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Leicester Pudding
Mix a heaped tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda and a small pinch of salt with a pound of flour. Add the finely-minced rind of half a lemon, a quarter of a nutmeg, grated, four ounces of finely-shredded beef suet, a table-spoonful of sugar, and half a pound of stoned raisins. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, stir into them a pint of milk, put the mixture into a buttered mould, tie it in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and let it boil quickly until done enough. Send wine or brandy sauce to table with it. Time to boil, two hours and a half. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the older sort, raised with soda rather than eggs. Most of what needs translating is the vessel and the imperial measures.
- The soda needs an acidA heaped teaspoon of carbonate of soda with sweet milk and no acid ingredient has little to react with, and what lift you get can come with a soapy edge. Buttermilk or soured milk in place of the pint, or swapping the soda for about three to four teaspoons of baking powder, gives the lighter crumb the recipe is aiming at.
- Imperial measuresThe pint here is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or about 2 1/2 US cups. A pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups; four ounces of suet is about 3/4 cup shredded.
- SuetPackaged shredded beef suet is sold in the UK and online elsewhere; fresh kidney suet from a butcher should be chilled hard and grated. Frozen grated butter is the usual substitute, though the pudding will be denser and richer.
- A quarter of a nutmegThat is a generous half teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg. Grate it at the last moment; pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its point within weeks.
- Mould and clothThe quantities here fill a basin of about 3 pints (1.7 litres), leaving headroom. Rather than a floured cloth, butter the basin and cover with a pleated round of baking parchment and foil, tied under the rim with string and a loop over the top for lifting.
- Boil or steamStand the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, lid on, at a steady simmer. Top up with boiling water from a kettle as it drops; a basin that boils dry will scorch and crack.
- DonenessTwo and a half hours is right for this size. A skewer through the centre should come out clean and the pudding should shrink slightly from the sides; rest five minutes before turning out.
- YieldFour or five is conservative for a pound of flour. Cut in wedges it will serve six to eight, and it reheats well by steaming for twenty minutes.
- The sauceWine or brandy sauce means a sweetened white sauce or a thin custard with a couple of tablespoons of sherry or brandy stirred in off the heat, not hard sauce.
Boiled suet puddings tied in a floured cloth were the everyday sweet course of British households for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cooked in the same pot as the meat where fuel was scarce. This one belongs to the later, easier generation of them: carbonate of soda became a cheap kitchen staple from the middle of the nineteenth century, and it let cooks raise a heavy flour-and-suet mixture without eggs, which were expensive and seasonal. The county names attached to such puddings emdash Leicester, Kentish, Sussex emdash were probably not strict geographical claims by the time Cassell's compiled them; they may well have served as little more than shorthand in a dictionary that needed to distinguish dozens of near-identical suet mixtures from one another. The costing of one shilling, given as a matter of course, is a reminder that this was a reference book for a household managing a budget as much as a kitchen.