Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rhubarb Pudding
Rhubarb Pudding
Butter a basin which will hold a pint and a half, and line it with good suet crust rolled out to the thickness of half an inch. Fill it with rhubarb which has been stewed for a quarter of an hour with a little moist sugar and the rind of half a lemon. Cover the pudding with pastry, rolled out to the same thickness as the sides, pinch the edges securely, tie the pudding in a cloth, and boil in plenty of water until done enough. The water must not cease boiling. Turn the pudding out carefully, and cut a small opening in the top, that the steam may escape. Send sweetened melted butter or a jug of cream and sifted sugar to table with it. Time to boil, two hours. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A boiled suet pudding of the plainest English kind, and the technique matters more than the filling. Two points decide whether it succeeds: the water must never stop boiling, and the stewed rhubarb must go in without its flood of juice.
- Drain the fruitRhubarb throws an enormous amount of liquid when stewed. Lift the fruit out with a slotted spoon and let it cool before filling the basin, or the crust will be waterlogged from the inside and may burst at the seam. Reserve the syrup and serve it alongside.
- Suet crust, since the book assumes itThe standard proportion is 8 oz plain flour to 4 oz shredded suet, a teaspoon of baking powder, a pinch of salt and about 5 fl oz cold water. Mix to a soft dough and handle it as little as possible. Note that the recipe wants the lid rolled to the same half-inch thickness as the lining.
- The basinA pint and a half is 30 fl oz, about 850 ml, so a 1-litre pudding basin is the nearest modern size. Butter it well; the crust sticks readily where the fruit juice has run.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar. Light soft brown is the nearest match; caster or granulated will work but gives a cleaner, less caramelly flavour.
- Lemon rindPare the rind in strips rather than grating it, and fish the strips out before the fruit goes into the crust. Grated zest is fine if you prefer it distributed through the filling.
- Cloth or foilThe floured cloth tied over the basin is authentic but leaks. A pleated round of buttered baking parchment under a pleated layer of foil, tied under the rim with string, does the same job and is easier to lift out.
- Boiling water, kept boilingStand the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan and pour in boiling water to two-thirds up the side. Top up from a kettle as it falls. If the water goes off the boil the suet stops rising and the crust is liable to turn heavy; the recipe sets this out as a separate instruction for a reason. A steamer over rolling water works as well and needs less attention.
- Time and yieldTwo hours holds good. Rest the turned-out pudding a minute or two before cutting the steam vent, and serve five to six. 'Melted butter' in Victorian usage means a flour-thickened butter sauce, here sweetened, rather than plain butter run to a liquid.
- LeavesOnly the stalks are food. Rhubarb leaves contain enough oxalic acid to be a genuine hazard and should be discarded.
Boiled suet puddings tied in a cloth were the backbone of English domestic sweets from the seventeenth century onward, workable in a household with a single pot over a fire and no reliable oven; the lined basin is largely a nineteenth-century form. Rhubarb suited them perfectly: it was cheap, it grew in almost any garden, and it arrived in early spring when stored apples were finished and nothing else was ready. Its rise as a dessert fruit is generally traced to the early nineteenth century, once sugar was cheap enough to make its sharpness palatable and forcing had produced tender pink stalks; before that it was grown chiefly as a medicinal root. It was a dish squarely among the economical family puddings such collections were compiled to supply.