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Puddings in Haste
Take a cupful each of finely-shredded suet, finely-grated bread-crumbs, and picked and washed currants. Mix these ingredients with two table-spoonfuls of sugar, a little grated nutmeg, a tea-spoonful of sliced peel, and a pinch of salt. When the dry ingredients are well mixed, make them up into a light paste with two well-beaten eggs and half a cupful of milk. Wring some small cloths out of boiling water, flour them, and tie in each a small tea-cupful of the mixture. Plunge them into boiling water, and boil quickly. Turn them out on a hot dish, sprinkle white sugar thickly over them, and serve. Time to boil, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 8d.
A boiled suet pudding scaled down to individual portions so it cooks in twenty minutes rather than three hours. Everything depends on the cloths being handled properly.
- The hinge: prepare the cloths correctlyWring each square of cloth out of boiling water, then dust the damp inner face generously with flour. The scald-and-flour step is what forms a skin that keeps water out of the pudding; a dry or unfloured cloth gives a soggy, seeping result. Tie leaving some slack, as the mixture swells in the pot.
- Cloths and a modern substituteThe book says only "small cloths"; squares of unbleached calico or well-washed linen roughly 12 inches across, tied with kitchen string, will do. If you would rather not boil cloths, the same mixture can be steamed in buttered dariole moulds or 6 oz ramekins, covered with pleated foil, for around 30-35 minutes.
- SuetThis means raw beef kidney fat, shredded fine. Butchers still sell it; the packaged shredded suet sold in Britain (beef or vegetarian) works directly. In the United States, freeze a piece of beef fat and grate it, or substitute frozen grated butter, accepting a slightly less springy crumb.
- Currants and peelCurrants are dried Zante grapes, not fresh red or black currants. "A tea-spoonful of sliced peel" is candied citrus peel, cut into thin strips; the pre-diced mixed peel sold for fruitcake is the same thing.
- "Boil quickly"This means keep the water at a full rolling boil throughout, not that it should be rushed. Top up with boiling water from a kettle so the pan never drops off the boil, or the puddings will be heavy in the centre.
- Cup measures hereThe book measures the three main ingredients by volume rather than weight, and it uses "cupful" for the mixture and "a small tea-cupful" for the portions, so the two are not necessarily the same vessel. Filling one cup with shredded suet, another with crumbs and another with currants gives about the right balance whatever cup you use; the half-cup of milk should be treated as a starting point and adjusted to a batter that just drops from the spoon.
- Bread-crumbsFresh soft crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dried or packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and will need extra milk.
- Yield and servingExpect six to eight small puddings from this quantity. Sugar sprinkled thickly over is the finish the recipe gives; warm custard or a thin brandy or lemon sauce would not be out of place.
Boiled puddings tied in cloths were the backbone of English domestic sweets from the seventeenth century onward, and this recipe is essentially a Christmas pudding stripped of its long list of fruit and spirits and its half-day in the pot. The cloth itself was the innovation that made such puddings possible: before it, suet mixtures were cooked in an animal's stomach or intestine, and the free-hanging pudding cloth gave cooks a vessel that needed nothing but a pan of water. Cassell's includes it among quick dishes because dividing the mixture into teacup portions cuts the boiling from hours to twenty minutes, a real consideration in a kitchen where the same range had to serve the whole meal. The page quotes a cost of 8d, at a time when suet, crumbs and currants were the cheapest route to something rich.