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Suet Pudding
Chop eight ounces of suet finely. Mix with it an equal weight of finely-grated bread-crumbs, and add a pinch of salt, four table-spoonfuls of sugar, and the grated rind and strained juice of a lemon, and two eggs. Mix thoroughly. Tie the mixture in a cloth, leaving room for the pudding to swell, and boil quickly till done enough. Time to boil, four hours. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the old school: no flour, no raising agent, just crumbs, fat, eggs and lemon. It is denser and more custardy than a flour-based suet roll, and the handling of the cloth is what decides whether it succeeds.
- The hinge: the clothScald the cloth in boiling water, wring it out and dust the inside well with flour before filling. The damp flour forms a skin that keeps water out of the pudding; a dry cloth lets the outside turn to paste. Tie loosely enough to allow about an inch of swelling, but tie the string tightly at the neck.
- Keep it at a rolling boil"Boil quickly" is an instruction, not a flourish. The water must never go off the boil or drop below the top of the pudding, and it must be topped up with boiling water only. Cold water added mid-cook makes a heavy, sodden pudding.
- Four hours is insuranceFour hours is generous -- A pudding of this size, all crumb and no raw flour, will very likely be set through well before the four hours are up, though a cloth pudding is hard to test without unwrapping it, which may be part of why the older times run long. It will not spoil at three hours.
- SuetBeef kidney suet chopped fine is the original. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, substitutes weight for weight and needs no chopping, though it is already dusted with flour, which makes the pudding a shade firmer.
- BreadcrumbsFresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, grated fine. Dried or packaged crumbs absorb differently and give a gritty, tight result. Eight ounces is a large volume of fresh crumbs, roughly four cups loosely packed.
- Basin instead of clothIf you would rather not manage a cloth, the same mixture goes into a buttered 1.5-pint pudding basin, covered with pleated parchment and foil and steamed. Steaming in a basin runs slower than boiling in a cloth, so allow the full time.
- Sweetness and bindingFour tablespoons of sugar is modest by modern standards for a pudding this rich; the lemon is doing most of the flavouring. Two eggs are the only binder, so mix thoroughly enough that no dry crumb remains.
- ServingTurn out at once, since a cloth pudding left standing sticks. It wants a sauce: lemon sauce, a sweet white sauce, custard or simply warmed golden syrup. Serves four to five as the book says, which is a fair estimate.
- "Probable cost, 8d"Eight pre-decimal pence, from a book that routinely gave a probable cost and a number of servings as a guide to household budgeting. Treat it as a note on the recipe's standing as cheap family food rather than a figure to convert.
Boiled suet puddings belong to a distinctively British line of cookery that opened up once cooks began boiling puddings in a floured cloth rather than stuffing them into an animal's gut or stomach bag; the cloth is generally traced to the seventeenth century, and it is usually credited with turning pudding from an offal-time speciality into something any kitchen could make on any day. Cassell's places this one among the plainest of the family: no flour, no dried fruit, no spice beyond a lemon, and a cost carefully noted in pence. Breadcrumbs in place of flour was one common way to get a lighter, softer eating pudding out of the same amount of suet, and it also used up stale bread.