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Shropshire Pudding
Take half a pound of stale brown bread, and grate it finely. Mix with the crumbs half a pound of finely-shredded beef-suet, six table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, half a nutmeg, grated, the strained juice and minced rind of a fresh lemon, and the well-beaten yolks of four and the whites of two eggs. A spoonful of brandy may be added or not. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, and turn the mixture into a buttered mould. Tie it in a cloth, plunge it into fast boiling water, and keep it boiling quickly until done enough. A little melted butter, sweetened and flavoured with brandy, may be sent to table with it. Time to boil, four hours. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the older sort, leavened by nothing but beaten egg. The essentials are a well-buttered mould, a tight cloth, and water that never stops boiling.
- Keep the water boiling and topped upThere is no leavening beyond the eggs, so the heat must be constant from the moment it goes in. Keep a kettle of boiling water alongside and replenish as the level falls, never with cold water, and keep the mould from resting directly on the pan bottom by setting it on a trivet or an inverted saucer.
- Stale brown breadThis means a plain wholemeal or brown wheat loaf a day or two old, not a molasses-sweetened sandwich bread. Half a pound of grated crumbs is roughly 4 cups, loosely packed; dry the crumbs a little in a low oven if the loaf is soft, or the pudding will be heavy.
- SuetHalf a pound (225 g) of beef suet, finely shredded, is what gives the pudding its texture. Fresh suet from a butcher should be chilled hard and grated; packaged shredded suet works as sold. Frozen grated butter can stand in, but the crumb will be shorter and less springy.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is a soft, damp, partly refined sugar, closest today to light brown sugar. Six tablespoons is about 75 g.
- Half a nutmegGrated whole, half a nutmeg comes to roughly 1 to 1.5 teaspoons, which is assertive by current taste. Half that amount suits most modern palates, and the lemon rind carries plenty of flavour on its own.
- The eggsFour yolks plus two whites, not four whole eggs. The extra yolks enrich; the reserved whites would make the pudding drier. Beat the whites separately to a soft foam and fold them in last for a lighter result.
- Mould and clothUse a 1.5-quart (1.5 litre) pudding basin, buttered, filled no more than three-quarters. Cover with buttered parchment, then the floured cloth tied firmly under the rim with a loop of string for lifting. Steaming in a covered pot over an inch of water is less trouble, though being gentler than the fast boiling water specified it may need somewhat longer.
- Sauce and servingThe melted-butter sauce is butter thinned with a little hot water or cream, sweetened and laced with brandy. Turn the pudding out onto a warm dish and serve at once. Five or six portions, as stated.
Puddings boiled in a cloth or mould are generally traced to the seventeenth century as a backbone of English household cookery, and by the time Cassell's was compiled a good many were attached to place names, usually a local twist on a standard formula rather than a distinct invention. Here the brown bread is what sets the recipe apart from a richer London pudding using white crumbs or flour: this one leans on a wholemeal loaf, suet and soft sugar, with lemon and nutmeg doing the work that dried fruit does in a Christmas pudding. The costing of 1s. 2d. for five or six people is the point of the entry as much as the flavour is; Cassell's priced its recipes so a housekeeper could see at a glance what a dish would take out of the week's money, and a pudding built from stale bread and butcher's suet was among the cheapest ways to end a meal with something substantial. Nutmeg and brandy were the standing flavourings of the boiled-pudding tradition, and the optional spoonful of spirit marks a dish that could be dressed up for company or left plain for family.