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Jam Pudding
Take a quarter of a pound of flour, a quarter of a pound of bread-crumbs, two ounces of suet, a table-spoonful of sugar, and a tea-spoonful of baking powder; mix all together to a stiff paste with cold water, and roll out very thin. Grease a pudding basin, line it with the pastry, spread some jam on the bottom, place a layer of pastry over it, and so on in alternate layers till the basin is full. Cover with greased paper, and steam for three hours. Turn out, and serve with custard sauce.
A layered steamed suet pudding of the plainest sort, and the sort of thing Cassell's expected a cook to produce from the store cupboard. A few points make it behave.
- Quantities in metricA quarter pound is about 115 g, so 115 g flour, 115 g breadcrumbs, 55 g shredded suet, about 15 g sugar and 5 g baking powder. The recipe gives no basin size; fill whatever basin you use with alternate layers as directed. It will serve about four.
- SuetBeef suet is still sold shredded and packaged, and vegetable suet can be substituted here. If using a block, freeze it and grate it coarsely; softened suet will smear into the flour and the crust turns heavy.
- Water, sparingly"Stiff paste with cold water" means just enough to bring it together; add it a spoonful at a time and stop as soon as the paste coheres. A wet dough will not roll thin and the layers collapse into the jam.
- The hinge: thin layers, sealed edgesEach pastry disc must reach the wall of the basin and be pressed against the layer below, or the jam finds a channel, runs to the bottom and the pudding will not turn out. Three or four layers of jam is plenty.
- CoveringGreased paper alone lets condensation in over three hours. Use greased baking parchment with a pleat, then foil or a tied cloth over it, so the top stays dry.
- SteamingKeep the water at a steady simmer no more than halfway up the basin and top it up with boiling water as it drops. Three hours is generous for this size; two to two and a half hours gives a lighter result, and it is done when the crust is set and springs back.
- Turning outRest five minutes before inverting, and warm the jam slightly if it has set firm — hot jam runs and scalds, so let the pudding stand before serving.
- Custard sauceThe book means a pouring custard: egg yolks, sugar and milk stirred over low heat to about 175F, not a set baked custard.
Suet puddings boiled or steamed in a basin were the backbone of English domestic cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and by the time Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery appeared the pudding cloth had largely given way to the greased basin and its paper cover. This version belongs to the thrifty end of the range: half the bulk is breadcrumbs rather than flour, the suet is modest, and the jam does the work that dried fruit and eggs would do in a richer pudding. The baking powder is a marker of date — chemical raising agents are generally said to have become reliable and cheap in British kitchens around the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and cookery writers folded them into old suet-crust recipes to lighten a paste that had previously depended on nothing but steam. Layered jam puddings of this type are close cousins of the rolled jam roly-poly, and both are often said to have survived in school and institutional cooking well into the twentieth century for the same reason they appear here: they are filling, cheap, and need only a pan of simmering water.