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Recruits' Pudding
Pound two ounces of sweet almonds to a smooth paste, and add as much new milk as will make a thick batter. Shred finely a pound of suet, and mix with it a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Add the almond milk, a pinch of salt, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, the well-whisked yolks of five eggs, the white of one egg, and a table-spoonful of brandy. Tie the mixture in a floured cloth, and boil it, or, if preferred, put the pudding into a buttered dish, and bake it until done enough. Time, two hours and a half to three hours. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A plain Victorian suet pudding stretched with breadcrumbs and enriched with almond milk — the sort of thing meant to fill men up cheaply, hence the name. Two decisions matter: how you handle the suet, and how you contain the pudding while it cooks.
- The hinge: keep the suet coldShredded suet must stay cold and separate until the pudding hits the heat, so it melts inside the crumb and leaves the texture open. If it warms into a paste while you mix, the pudding sets close and greasy.
- Almond milk from scratchPounding the 2 oz of almonds to a paste and slackening it with milk gives a small quantity of thick almond cream; the recipe fixes no amount of milk beyond 'as much as will make a thick batter'. A food processor does it in a minute; ground almonds whisked into warm whole milk are an acceptable shortcut, though less smooth.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured. Nothing exotic is intended.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded and floured in Britain and available frozen or from a butcher elsewhere. A pound of suet to a pound of crumbs makes a very rich pudding; halving the suet gives a firmer, leaner result.
- BreadcrumbsDry, finely grated crumbs from stale white bread — not fresh soft crumbs and not commercial dried crumbs, which are too sandy and absorb differently. Weigh rather than measure by volume.
- Boiling in a clothScald a large square of cotton or linen, wring it out, flour the inside generously, heap the mixture in the centre, and tie loosely to leave room for swelling. Lower into fast-boiling water, keep it at a steady simmer, and top up with boiling water so the pudding is never uncovered. A large buttered basin -- this is some 2 lb of dry ingredients before the liquid, so 3 pints or more -- covered with pleated parchment and foil and steamed the same length of time, is easier to manage.
- If you bake it insteadThe recipe says only 'until done enough' and names no oven heat. A moderate oven, around 350F, baking until set in the centre and browned on top, is a reasonable modern reading. Note that the stated two and a half to three hours follows both options in the original and may have been meant to cover either.
- Yield and servingSix to seven servings, as stated. Serve hot in slices with a sweet sauce — brandy sauce, custard, or plain melted butter and sugar; the pudding itself is barely sweet, with only two tablespoons of sugar in the whole mixture.
- CostThe "2s." is two shillings, a shopping note for a nineteenth-century household and no guide to anything now.
Cassell's carried dozens of boiled suet puddings, and the naming convention tells you who they were for: puddings named for a trade or a class of eater were the cheap, filling, fat-and-crumb end of the range, distinguished from the fruit-heavy Christmas and plum puddings by their want of dried fruit. This one is a small step up from the plainest sort — five egg yolks, a spoonful of brandy and pounded almonds give it some pretension — but the structure is the old English standby of equal weights of suet and breadcrumbs, boiled in a floured cloth for hours over a fire that was burning anyway. Almond milk of the kind made here, nuts pounded and let down with liquid, had been in English kitchens since the medieval period, when it was a fast-day substitute for dairy; by the later nineteenth century it survived mainly as a flavouring. The recipe offers the option to boil the pudding \"or, if preferred\" bake it, one of the many places where the book's cookbooks hedged by giving both methods.