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Snowdon Pudding
Shred four ounces of beef suet very finely, and mix with it a pinch of salt, two table-spoonfuls of pounded sugar, one ounce of sago, three ounces of orange marmalade, half a pound of grated bread-crumbs, three well-beaten eggs, and a dessert-spoonful of brandy. Beat the ingredients together till the mixture is quite smooth. Butter a mould thickly, dredge a little flour upon it, and stick into it even rows of raisins. Put the pudding into it very gently, and in table-spoonfuls, not to disturb the raisins, lay a round of oiled or buttered paper on the surface, and tie the pudding in a cloth. Boil or steam it till done. Let it stand a few minutes after it is taken up before turning it out. Send wine sauce to table with it. If liked, two table-spoonfuls of apricot jam may be substituted for the marmalade, and a table-spoonful of ground rice for the sago. Time to boil the pudding, about an hour. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A boiled suet pudding of the plainer Victorian sort, distinguished by the raisins pressed into the buttered mould so they appear studded over the turned-out dome. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the ingredients and the timing need translation.
- The hinge: keep the raisins in placeThe mould is buttered heavily and dusted with flour so the raisins stick where you put them, and the batter goes in a spoonful at a time for the same reason. Tip the mixture in all at once and the pattern slides into a heap at the bottom.
- SuetFour ounces is about 115 g. Shredded packet suet works directly; fresh beef suet from a butcher should be stripped of membrane and grated on the coarse side while very cold. Vegetarian suet behaves the same in this pudding.
- SagoSmall pearl sago or tapioca, sold in Asian and Caribbean groceries. One ounce is roughly 2 tablespoons. Larger dry pearls may not soften completely in an hour inside a dense batter, so if in doubt soak them in a little milk or water for half an hour first, or use the ground rice the recipe offers as an alternative.
- BreadcrumbsHalf a pound is about 225 g, and it means soft crumbs grated from a day-old loaf, not dry golden crumb. Packaged dried crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give a heavy, sandy pudding.
- MeasuresA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons; the pounded sugar is simply caster sugar. Marmalade at three ounces is roughly a scant third of a cup.
- The mould and the clothUse a 1.2-litre (2-pint) pudding basin. In place of the cloth, a pleated round of buttered baking parchment and a layer of foil tied under the rim does the same job and keeps water out. The pleat lets the pudding rise.
- SteamingAn hour at a steady simmer, with the water coming halfway up the basin and topped up from the kettle as it drops. Never let it come off the boil, and never let it boil dry. The resting few minutes before turning out lets the pudding pull away from the sides.
- Wine sauceThe period sauce is a sweet white wine or sherry thickened with a little butter and flour or with egg yolk, sugared and served hot. Custard or a plain brandy butter is a reasonable substitute.
- YieldFour to five, as stated, and it holds well: leftovers steam back to life in fifteen minutes. The ninepence given as the probable cost is a Victorian household-budget figure, not a guide to anything now.
The pudding takes its name from Snowdon, the highest peak in Wales, and the raisin-studded exterior is generally explained as a nod to the mountain itself, though that reading may be later than the dish. It is often said to have originated at the Pen-y-Gwryd inn at the head of the Llanberis Pass, a long-standing base for climbers, though that attribution is repeated tradition rather than documented fact, and a version appears in Lady Llanover's The First Principles of Good Cookery (1867), part of her wider campaign to promote Welsh food and language. Cassell's includes it as one of dozens of interchangeable boiled suet puddings that formed the backbone of the British sweet course: a fat, a starch, eggs, and whatever preserve the store cupboard held, which is why marmalade and apricot jam are offered as equals here. The marmalade is the one ingredient doing real work, supplying both sweetness and the bitter-orange edge that keeps the suet from tasting merely rich.