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Half-Pay Pudding
Take half a pound of flour and half a pound of bread-crumbs, mix them along with sufficient salt and a tea-spoonful of baking powder; add half a pound of chopped suet, six ounces of currants, six ounces of sultanas or raisins, three table-spoonfuls of treacle, and enough milk to make a stiff batter. Beat all together for five minutes, pour into a greased mould or basin, boil for three hours, or steam for four hours, and turn out. Serve with a sweet sauce. Probable cost, 1s.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the cheapest sort, and it works as written provided the water never stops simmering. The main adjustments are unit conversions and the ingredients that have changed names.
- Quantities in cupsHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups; half a pound of fresh breadcrumbs is roughly 4 cups loosely packed, or about 2 cups if you use dried crumbs. Six ounces of currants or sultanas is about 1¼ cups of each.
- SuetHalf a pound (225 g) of beef suet, shredded fine and cold. Packaged shredded suet, fresh or vegetarian, is sold for exactly this purpose; if you buy raw kidney fat from a butcher, chill it hard and grate it, discarding membrane. Frozen grated butter is a workable substitute but gives a denser, shorter crumb.
- TreacleBritish treacle here means black treacle — close to blackstrap molasses, not golden syrup and not corn syrup. Three tablespoons is what gives the pudding its colour and its faintly bitter edge.
- Baking powderA single teaspoon in this much flour is modest by modern standards; the pudding is meant to be close-textured rather than cakey. Use double-acting powder and do not increase it, or the pudding will rise against the lid and then collapse.
- "Stiff batter"Aim for a mixture that drops reluctantly from the spoon — thicker than cake batter, looser than dough. Expect roughly 1 to 1¼ cups of milk depending on whether your crumbs are fresh or dried.
- The basin and the boilGrease a pudding basin of about 2 quarts (or two smaller ones), fill no more than three-quarters, and cover with pleated parchment and foil tied under the rim, or a lidded plastic pudding basin. Stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up, keep the lid on, and top up with boiling water so it never runs dry — a scorched basin is the usual failure here.
- TimingThree hours boiled or four steamed is genuine, not an exaggeration; suet needs long, gentle heat to melt out and set the crumb. The pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Yield and sauceServes six to eight. 'Sweet sauce' at this date would usually have meant something like a thin custard or a sweetened white sauce flavoured with brandy or lemon.
- KeepingIt reheats better than it keeps warm: steam individual slices for a few minutes, or wrap the whole pudding, refrigerate up to a week, and re-steam for an hour.
The name is the joke and the recipe: half-pay was the reduced allowance drawn by an officer of the Army or Navy not on active service, a byword through the nineteenth century for genteel poverty, and a half-pay pudding is a plum pudding built for that income. Where a Christmas pudding leans on eggs, brandy, candied peel and a pound or more of dried fruit, this one stretches flour with breadcrumbs, drops the eggs entirely, and gets its sweetness and colour from treacle rather than sugar — treacle being a cheap sweetener, a by-product of sugar refining. The printed "probable cost" is the giveaway that the book was written for households counting shillings: a shilling for a large pudding was the point of including it at all. Boiled suet puddings of this family go back well before the era of baking powder; the teaspoonful of powder here marks the recipe as a later, chemically assisted version of a much older kind of dish.