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SUET PUDDING, PLAIN (served with sugar and lemon-juice)
Rub two ounces of finely-shredded suet into a pound of flour. Add half a tea-spoonful of salt, and just before the water or milk is added mix in two tea-spoonfuls of baking-powder. Add water to make a tolerably light paste; then put the pudding in a floured cloth, and boil it till done enough. This pudding is also very good with gravy. Time to boil, one hour. Probable cost, 5d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A cloth-boiled suet pudding of the plainest kind — barely more than flour, fat and leavening. The original gives no liquid quantity, which is the one thing you need to judge for yourself.
- The liquid is unspecifiedExpect roughly 250–300 ml (about 1 to 1¼ cups) of cold water or milk for a pound of flour, added gradually. "Tolerably light paste" means a soft, just-cohesive dough that holds a shape but is not stiff like pastry.
- Add the baking powder last, as instructedThis is the hinge. Chemical leavening starts working the moment it meets liquid, so it goes in dry at the last second and the dough goes straight into the cloth and into boiling water. Dough left standing gives a dense, heavy pudding.
- SuetTwo ounces (about 57 g) to a pound of flour is lean by modern standards; many suet pudding recipes use rather more, commonly 4 oz or above. Packaged shredded beef suet works directly; a block of fresh kidney suet needs the membrane stripped and should be grated frozen. Vegetable suet can generally be substituted in the same proportion.
- FlourPlain (all-purpose) flour, since the baking powder supplies the lift. A pound is about 3½ cups.
- The pudding clothScald a square of cotton or linen, wring it out, and dust it generously with flour — the flour forms the skin that keeps water out. Tie loosely with string to leave room for swelling, and lower into water already at a rolling boil, keeping it topped up so the pudding is never uncovered.
- "Till done enough"One hour, as given at the end, is right for a single pudding of this size. A skewer through the centre should come out clean and the surface should feel springy rather than slack.
- Cost and yieldFivepence in pre-decimal money for a dish feeding four or five, i.e. about a penny a head. It serves four or five as a filling pudding, dusted with sugar and lemon juice as the title indicates, or with gravy, which the recipe notes is also very good.
Boiled suet pudding in a cloth is one of the oldest survivals in English cookery, the pudding cloth being recorded from the early seventeenth century and the pudding basin a much later fixture: before tins and ovens were common in working households, a cloth and a pot of boiling water were all the equipment a cook needed, and the same pot could hold the meat. The fact that Cassell's offers it both sweet, with sugar and lemon juice, and savoury, with gravy, is characteristic of the period. The baking powder here marks the recipe as late nineteenth century rather than earlier; commercial baking powders appeared in Britain from the 1840s, though their uptake was gradual, and they gradually replaced the older reliance on eggs and long boiling for texture.