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Sussex Pudding
Mix ingredients as for ordinary suet pudding. Make them into a stiff paste with cold water, and knead it well. Roll it to the shape of a bolster, tie it in a cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and let it boil quickly for an hour. Take it up, cut it into slices the third of an inch thick, and put these into the dripping-tin under a roasting joint. When they are slightly browned and soaked with dripping, serve them with the meat. Time to soak in the dripping, about twenty minutes. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, 2d.
A plain boiled suet paste, sliced and finished in the fat under a roasting joint — closer in purpose to Yorkshire pudding than to any sweet pudding. The instructions assume you already know the suet-pudding proportions from elsewhere in the book.
- The unstated ingredients"As for ordinary suet pudding" is not spelled out here; the proportions would have to be taken from the book's own suet-pudding entry. A common Victorian suet crust runs somewhere around 2:1 flour to shredded suet by weight — on that basis, say 8 oz flour, 4 oz suet, a good pinch of salt — bound with cold water to a stiff, not sticky, paste. No egg, no sugar; this is a savoury accompaniment.
- Suet itselfBeef suet was bought in a lump and shredded at home. Packet shredded beef suet behaves the same; vegetarian shredded suet works but browns less richly in the dripping.
- The clothScald the cloth, wring it out and flour the inside surface generously before rolling the paste in it — the flour sets into a skin that keeps water out. Tie both ends and the seam, leaving a little slack for swelling, and keep the water at a genuine rolling boil the whole hour, topping up with boiling water so the pudding is never uncovered.
- "Boil quickly"This means hard, not briefly. A slack simmer gives a heavy, sodden bolster; the full hour at a rolling boil is what makes it sliceable.
- The dripping-tinIn many Victorian kitchens the joint turned before the fire with a tin beneath catching the fat, though closed ranges with ovens were also in use by this date. In a modern oven, set the joint on a rack over a shallow tin and lay the slices in the fat below for the last twenty minutes of roasting, turning once so both sides colour. The recipe gives no temperature; go by whatever the joint requires.
- Cut it cold-ishLet the pudding stand a few minutes out of the cloth before slicing. A third of an inch is thin — a hot, freshly boiled roll will tear at that thickness.
- Yield and costFour or five as a side dish, not as a course on its own; the recipe says to serve the slices with the meat. The probable cost is given as 2d., consistent with a cheap filler served alongside the joint.
Sussex has a long association with boiled suet puddings — Sussex Pond Pudding is the famous survivor — and this is the everyday, savoury end of that tradition: flour, suet, water, and nothing else. Serving a plain farinaceous pudding with, or before, the roast was standard economy in English households through the nineteenth century, the same logic that put Yorkshire pudding under the beef and batter puddings on the table ahead of it: the cheap thing fills the diners so the dear thing goes further. The second cooking matters, the slices soaking up dripping under the joint until they brown, which turns a bland boiled paste into something worth eating. Cassell's gives the probable cost as tuppence, a figure the book supplies for nearly every dish and the clearest sign of who it was written for — mistresses and cooks costing out a week's dinners to the penny.