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Orange Marmalade Pudding
Shred six ounces of beef suet very finely, mix with it half a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs, half a pound of orange marmalade, two table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, an ounce of candied peel chopped small, a pinch of salt, three well-beaten eggs, and a quarter of a pint of new milk. Put the mixture into a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and let it keep boiling until it is done enough. Turn out carefully, and serve with wine sauce. If preferred, this pudding may be boiled in a mould, but care must be taken that the mould is quite filled with the mixture; or it may be steamed. Time to boil or steam the pudding, four hours. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A boiled suet pudding of the plainest Victorian type, lifted by half a pound of marmalade. Nothing here is difficult, but the cloth and the four hours both need managing.
- Keep the water boiling and topped upThe one thing that ruins a cloth pudding is the pot going off the boil or running dry. Keep a kettle of boiling water beside the pan and top up over four hours, always with boiling water, never cold.
- Beef suetShredded packet suet works directly, weight for weight; fresh butcher's suet must be stripped of membrane and grated on the coarse side, chilled. Vegetarian suet behaves much the same, though the flavour is blander.
- The imperial quarter-pintFive imperial fluid ounces, roughly 2/3 US cup or 140 ml. "New milk" simply means fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft brown sugar, closer to today's light muscovado than to white granulated. Two tablespoons of light brown sugar is the right substitute.
- BreadcrumbsHalf a pound is about 4 cups of fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, grated rather than blitzed to dust. Dried crumbs will absorb far more liquid and give a tight, heavy pudding.
- The clothScald a square of cotton or calico, wring it out, and flour the inside surface generously; the flour sets into the skin that holds the pudding. Tie loosely enough to allow a little swelling, and lower onto a plate or trivet so the pudding does not sit on the pan bottom.
- Mould or basin"Quite filled" applies to a boiled mould immersed in water, where an air gap lets water in. If you steam it in a basin instead, leave an inch of headspace and cover with pleated parchment and foil.
- Wine sauceA period wine sauce is sweet white wine or sherry thickened lightly with butter and sugar, sometimes with an egg yolk, served hot. Custard or a brandy butter serves the same purpose.
- Yield and keepingSix to eight portions, as stated. Like other suet puddings it will reheat by steaming, allowing something like 45 minutes, and will keep a day or two refrigerated.
Boiled suet puddings were the backbone of British domestic cookery for two centuries: a cloth, a pot already on the fire, and whatever sweetening the house ran to. What dates this particular version is the marmalade, used here by the half-pound as a flavouring rather than as a breakfast preserve. Bitter Seville orange marmalade had moved from a laborious January kitchen task to a commercially jarred staple over the course of the nineteenth century, Dundee being the name most often attached to that shift, and Cassell's readers could buy it by the pound. The costing of 1s. 6d. is characteristic of the book, which priced nearly every dish so that a mistress could judge whether it suited her housekeeping; the four-hour boil suggests a kitchen in which such long cooking was unremarkable.