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Judy's Pudding
Shred a quarter of a pound of beef suet very finely. Mix with it a quarter of a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs, a table-spoonful of flour, two table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, two well-beaten eggs, and a table-spoonful of brandy or whisky. When these ingredients are thoroughly blended, pour the mixture into a well buttered mould, lay a buttered paper over it, tie it in a floured cloth, and boil for one hour and a half. Turn the pudding out of the mould before serving, and pour brandied sauce round it. Probable cost, exclusive of the brandy, 6d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A small steamed suet pudding of the plainest kind — no fruit, no spice, just suet, crumbs, sugar and egg bound with a spoonful of spirit. It stands or falls on the steaming.
- Keep the water at a bare simmerA hard rolling boil forces water past the cloth and into the mould, and the pudding comes out sodden and heavy. Water should reach about two-thirds up the mould and be topped up with boiling water as it drops, never with cold.
- SuetFresh beef suet from a butcher, shredded from the hard fat around the kidney, is what is meant. Packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetable) works directly; if using fresh, chill it hard and grate rather than chop, since warm suet smears instead of shredding.
- Bread-crumbsGrate stale, close-crumbed white bread — dry, sandy crumbs, not the soft fresh kind and not commercial dried crumbs, which are too fine and give a pasty texture. The quarter pound is best weighed; measured loosely it runs somewhere between 1½ and 2 cups depending on how dry the crumbs are.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft brown sugar, damp enough to clump. Light brown sugar is the closest thing on a modern shelf; white granulated will work but loses the faint molasses note that is most of the pudding's flavour.
- The mould and coveringA pint-and-a-half pudding basin or metal mould, buttered, filled no more than three-quarters full to allow rise. Buttered paper then a floured cloth tied under the rim is the original method; buttered parchment and foil, pleated and tied, does the same job and is easier to lift.
- TimingAn hour and a half is right for this quantity, and it is not a recipe that suffers from ten minutes more. Test with a skewer to the centre — it should come out clean and hot. Let the pudding stand five minutes before turning out or it may slump.
- Brandied sauceCassell means a sweet sauce, not hard sauce: butter, sugar and brandy warmed together, sometimes thickened with a little flour or an egg yolk, and poured round rather than over. A thin custard with brandy stirred in serves the same purpose.
- YieldThree or four servings, as stated — this is a modest domestic pudding, not a Christmas one. The sixpence quoted is the book's own 'probable cost' for the dish, given exclusive of the brandy.
Suet puddings boiled in a cloth or mould were the backbone of English domestic sweets from the eighteenth century onward, made possible by the pudding cloth, which freed cooks from stuffing batters into animal guts and made a boiled pudding a routine weeknight matter. "Judy's Pudding" belongs to a large family of Victorian recipes given a woman's name — Judy, Nancy, Betsy, Aunt Mary's — though the origin of this particular name is not documented. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades, made a point of costing each dish to the penny, and the sixpence here places the pudding squarely in its intended market: an everyday sweet for a household that had stale bread, an egg or two and a butcher who sold suet by the pound. The brandy is the one luxury, and the book takes care to exclude it from the price.