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Suet Pastry, Common
Suet pastry is especially suited for boiled fruit or meat puddings. To make it, put a pound of flour into a bowl, add a pinch of salt and from six to eight ounces of good suet which has been finely shredded and freed entirely from skin and fibre. The suet should be well rubbed into the flour. Make a hole in the centre of the mixture, and pour in a small tea-cupful of water. Stir this in lightly with a knife, and if necessary add more water. Work the whole to a stiff paste, roll it out two or three times, and let it stand a few minutes before using it. If a small quantity only of suet is used, a tea-spoonful of baking-powder may be added, and this will help to make the pastry light.
A plain boiled-pudding crust, and the workhorse of Victorian pudding-making. The hinge is temperature: everything must stay cold so the suet stays in distinct shreds until the pudding hits the water.
- Quantities in modern termsA pound of flour is about 3½ cups (450 g); 6-8 oz suet is 170-225 g. This is a generous batch: enough to line and cover a large (about 2 pint / 1 litre) pudding basin, or to wrap a roll pudding, with trimmings likely.
- The teacupful of waterA Victorian tea-cup is roughly 5–6 fl oz, so start with about ⅔ cup and add more by the spoonful. Flour absorbency varies; aim for a firm, slightly tacky dough that leaves the bowl clean.
- Suet, and what to buyFresh beef kidney suet needs the skin and membrane stripped and the fat shredded on the coarse side of a grater — freeze it 20 minutes first or it smears. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works and is already prepared; use the same weight.
- Rub, do not cream"Well rubbed in" means dispersed as separate flakes, not blended smooth. Those flakes melt during the long steam and leave the open, spongy texture that distinguishes suet crust from shortcrust.
- Rolling and resting"Roll it out two or three times" probably amounts to a light lamination rather than puff-pastry folding: press it out, fold, press again. The few minutes' rest lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax so the crust is less likely to shrink.
- Baking powderThe book adds a teaspoonful to the pound of flour when "a small quantity only of suet is used", without saying what counts as small; take it as insurance at the lean end of its 6-8 oz range. Self-raising flour gives the same effect; do not use both.
- Cooking itThis is a boiled or steamed crust, not a baked one. Cover the basin with pleated parchment and foil, or a floured cloth, and keep the water at a steady simmer for 1½–2½ hours depending on the filling, topping up with boiling water so the pan never runs dry.
- Meat fillingsIf the pudding is filled with raw beef or kidney, allow the longer end of that range — the crust is done well before the meat is tender, and undercooking the filling is the usual failure.
Suet crust belongs to the English boiled-pudding tradition that grew up around the pudding cloth and, later, the pudding basin: a dough stiff enough to hold a filling and tolerant of hours in water, made with the hard fat from around beef kidneys rather than the butter reserved for finer pastry. Its great virtue in a nineteenth-century kitchen was that it needed no oven — a pot on the range or over the fire would do — which is why it sits among the basic pastes alongside short and puff, and why it underpins both sweet puddings and the savoury steak-and-kidney sort. The baking-powder note dates the entry: chemical raising agents are generally said to have become reliably cheap in British households in the second half of the century, and cookery writers were quick to offer them as insurance where a cook wanted to economise on fat.