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Suet Pudding, Dr. Kitchener's
Shred finely seven ounces of good kidney suet. Put this into a bowl, and mix with it half a tea-spoonful of salt, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, half a nutmeg, grated, half a tea-spoonful of thin lemon-rind chopped small, four ounces of flour, and three ounces of bread-crumbs. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly. Whisk two fresh eggs till they are light and frothy, add gradually a quarter of a pint of milk, and stir the liquor into the pudding. Let it stand half an hour. Put it in one lump into a well-floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and boil quickly until done enough. Serve with sweet or wine sauce. Time to boil, three hours. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the sort that anchored English family dinners for a century. The technique, not the ingredients, is where it goes wrong.
- The cloth is the whole recipeScald the cloth, wring it out, and flour the damp surface generously before the batter goes in. The flour forms a paste skin that seals the pudding; a dry or unfloured cloth lets water in and you get a grey, sodden outside.
- Keep it at a full boil"Boil quickly" is an instruction, not a flourish. If the water drops to a simmer or the pudding is allowed to stop boiling, the suet melts out before the flour and crumbs set. Top up with boiling water from a kettle, never cold.
- Quarter of a pint of milkImperial measure, so 5 fl oz, a scant 2/3 cup. The mixture should be stiff enough to go into the cloth in one lump, as the recipe directs, after its half-hour rest, in which the crumbs swell.
- Kidney suetFresh beef kidney suet, shredded off the membrane. Packaged shredded suet works and needs no preparation; vegetarian suet also works but gives a slightly drier crumb. Do not substitute butter, which melts too early.
- Half a nutmegThat is roughly a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg, which will dominate the pudding. Modern palates usually want a quarter to a half of that, plus the lemon rind.
- Three hours, and whyThe time is real for a dense cloth pudding of this size boiled in a big pot. If you prefer, the same mixture can be steamed in a greased basin, covered with pleated paper and foil, for at least as long; steaming is gentler and more forgiving of a lapse in the heat.
- Sweet or wine sauceA sweet sauce of this period generally meant melted butter beaten with sugar; wine sauce the same with sherry or Madeira added. Custard is the usual modern accompaniment.
- YieldFour or five as the book says, served in slices. It is filling, and reheats well steamed for 30 minutes.
The name points to Dr. William Kitchiner, who held a medical degree without practising and whose The Cook's Oracle (1817) was one of the first English cookbooks to give weights, measures and timings for its receipts, and whose recipes were reprinted and re-attributed for the rest of the century — the "probable cost, 10d." and "sufficient for four or five persons" are the standard formula Cassell's appends to every entry in the Dictionary of Cookery. A boiled suet pudding in a floured cloth was the everyday sweet of British kitchens before domestic ovens were common: it cooked in the same pot as everything else, over the fire, and the mixture of flour and breadcrumbs kept it lighter than a straight flour pudding. Kitchiner's version is notably genteel for the type, with sugar, nutmeg, lemon rind and two eggs where a labourer's pudding might have had suet, flour and water alone.