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SUET PUDDING (another way)
Chop small four ounces of suet free from skin and fibre. Add a pinch of salt, a little grated ginger, and half a pound of flour. Whisk two eggs with a quarter of a pint of milk. Stir this into the mixture till it is smooth and light. Tie the pudding in a floured cloth, being careful to leave it room to swell, and boil quickly till done enough. Serve with sweet or wine sauce. Time to boil, about two hours. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for four persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the simplest kind — flour, suet, egg and milk, boiled in a cloth and served with a sweet sauce. The only real difficulties are the cloth and the liquid.
- The hinge: keep the water boilingA cloth pudding must go into water already at a rolling boil and stay there, topped up from a kettle of boiling water as it evaporates. If the water goes off the boil or cold water is added, the outside slackens and the pudding takes in water and turns sodden.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher needs the skin and membrane pulled off and the fat chopped or grated fine — freezing it for twenty minutes makes this far easier. Packet shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) can be used ounce for ounce, 4 oz to 8 oz flour.
- MeasurementsHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups; 4 oz suet is roughly 1 cup shredded. A quarter of an Imperial pint is 5 fl oz, a scant ⅔ cup, and with two eggs that is a stiff mixture rather than a batter. Add milk by the spoonful until it is a soft dough that just drops from the spoon.
- FlourThe book assumes plain flour and no raising agent — this is a dense, close pudding by design. If you want it lighter, self-raising flour or a teaspoon of baking powder is the usual modern substitution, though it makes a different, cakier pudding.
- The clothScald a square of cotton or linen, wring it out, and dust it thickly with flour — the flour forms the skin that holds the shape. Tie loosely with string, leaving a good hand's width of slack for swelling, and knot the corners to make a handle. Suspend it from a wooden spoon across the pan rather than letting it sit on the base.
- Or use a basinA greased pudding basin of about 2 pints, covered with pleated parchment and foil and steamed, gives a similar result with much less anxiety. Steam 2 to 2½ hours.
- Doneness"Till done enough" means about two hours at a steady boil. It is ready when a skewer to the centre comes out clean and the pudding feels firm through the cloth. Rest it five minutes before unwrapping or it may collapse.
- Sauce and yieldSweet sauce here means a thin white sauce sweetened and flavoured with lemon or nutmeg; wine sauce is the same enriched with sherry or Madeira. Golden syrup, jam or custard all suit it. Serves four, as stated — the sixpence is Victorian retail pricing and of no use now.
Suet puddings sit at the centre of nineteenth-century English cookery because they are cheap, filling and cooked in the same pot as everything else — a cloth pudding could be boiled alongside the meat and greens over a single fire, which mattered in kitchens with one range and one fuel bill. Cassell's places this in the general run of plain family cookery, and the sixpenny costing is part of the point: the book routinely priced its dishes so a housekeeper could budget. The cloth itself is older than the basin; boiled puddings tied in a floured cloth are documented in English recipe books from the seventeenth century onward, and the technique is generally credited with freeing puddings from animal guts and turning them into everyday food. Versions with dried fruit became Christmas pudding; this undressed one, with only ginger and salt, is often said to stand close to the common root of both, and of the dumplings still boiled with stews.