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Half-Hour Dumplings
Take half a pound of beef suet, free from skin, and shred it finely. Mix with it half a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs, and add two ounces of moist sugar, four ounces of currants, cleaned and picked, the rind of half a lemon, finely-minced, a quarter of a nutmeg, grated, a pinch of a salt, a tea-spoonful of baking-powder, and a table-spoonful of flour. Mix thoroughly, work to a light paste with two well-beaten eggs, and a little water, if necessary. Divide the mixture into small balls, tie each ball in a small floured cloth, and boil for half an hour. Turn them out, and send sweetened sauce to table with the dumplings. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, 10d.
A quick suet pudding in miniature: the whole point is the half hour, against the two or three hours a full boiled pudding demanded. A few of the ingredients and one piece of equipment need translating.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, bought in a piece and shredded by hand; packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) is the direct substitute, half a pound being about 225 g. Do not swap in butter, which melts too early and gives a greasy, dense dumpling rather than a light one.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, closest today to light brown soft sugar. Two ounces is about a quarter cup packed.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Cleaned and picked" refers to washing off packing grit and removing stalks, largely unnecessary with modern packets, though a rinse and thorough dry does no harm.
- BreadcrumbsFinely grated crumbs from slightly stale white bread, soft rather than dry and sandy. Commercial dried breadcrumbs absorb water differently and will make the mixture stiff and hard; use fresh crumbs and expect to add little or no extra water.
- NutmegA quarter of a whole nutmeg, freshly grated, is roughly half a teaspoon.
- The clothsEach ball is tied in a floured cloth so it holds shape in rolling water. Squares of muslin or clean cotton, dipped in boiling water, wrung out and dusted with flour, still work; tie with string leaving a little slack for swelling. Failing that, the dumplings can be steamed in small greased moulds, though they will be closer in texture than boiled ones.
- The boilingThe water must be at a steady boil before the dumplings go in and must not be allowed to fall off, or the suet renders slowly and the crumb turns heavy. Half an hour suits balls of about golf-ball size; anything larger needs longer.
- Yield and sauceFive or six servings, perhaps ten to twelve small dumplings depending on how they are divided. "Sweetened sauce" would in this period usually mean a plain sweet white sauce, a lemon or wine sauce, or melted butter beaten with sugar; custard is the modern default.
Boiled suet puddings were the backbone of English domestic cookery for centuries, but they were slow: a plum pudding in a cloth might sit over the fire the better part of a day. The virtue advertised in the title here is speed, achieved by a paste built on breadcrumbs rather than flour, which cooks through fast, and a teaspoonful of commercial baking powder -- sold in Britain from the middle of the nineteenth century -- to lift it. The habit of printing a "probable cost" -- tenpence here, for five or six people -- tells you what the book was for: it was sold to households running on a fixed weekly allowance, where the price of a pudding mattered as much as its flavour, and where suet, currants and stale bread were all reliably to hand.