Home › The Principles of Cookery › Swiss Cocoa-Nut Puddings
Swiss Cocoa-Nut Puddings
Shred a quarter of a pound of beef suet very finely. Mix with it a quarter of a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs, and add two ounces of grated cocoa-nut, six ounces of strawberry or any other jam, and a quarter of a pound of powdered sugar. Beat two eggs with the milk of the cocoa-nut, or three table-spoonfuls of milk. Pour this liquor over the pudding, and let it stand to soak for an hour. Butter a mould thickly. Beat the pudding till the ingredients are thoroughly mixed, and put it into the mould. Tie it in a cloth, plunge it into fast-boiling water, and boil quickly until done enough. Turn it out, sift powdered sugar thickly upon it, and serve. Time to boil, three hours and a half. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A boiled suet pudding of the standard Victorian type, sweetened with jam and enriched with coconut. Nothing here is difficult, but the boiling needs steady attention over three and a half hours.
- The water must never stop boilingA suet pudding dropped into fast-boiling water sets its outer surface at once, which is what keeps it from taking in water. Top up from a kettle of boiling water as the level falls, and never add cold water or the pudding will be sodden and heavy.
- Weights in cupsA quarter pound is 4 oz, roughly 115 g: about 2 cups of fresh breadcrumbs, a scant cup of shredded suet, or 1/2 cup plus a tablespoon of caster sugar. The 2 oz of coconut is about 2/3 cup grated fresh, or 1/2 cup desiccated.
- "Cocoa-nut" is coconutThe Victorian spelling conflates the coconut with cocoa (from cacao), a confusion long current in English usage and dictionaries rather than a documented belief that the two plants were related. The recipe assumes a whole nut, cracked for its water and grated by hand. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works; if using it, soak it in the milk with the eggs, since it draws liquid greedily.
- Coconut water, not coconut milk"The milk of the cocoa-nut" means the thin liquid inside a fresh nut, not the thick tinned coconut milk sold today. Three tablespoons of dairy milk, as the recipe offers, is the simpler substitution.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded in packets in Britain and available frozen or from a butcher elsewhere. Vegetarian shredded suet behaves much the same. If you are shredding your own, chill it hard and pull away the papery membrane first.
- The hour's soak mattersBreadcrumbs need that time to swell and absorb the egg and milk; skipping it gives a pudding that is wet in the middle and gritty at the edges. Beat again just before it goes into the mould, as the recipe says.
- Mould and clothButter a 1-quart (1-litre) basin or mould heavily, cover with a pleated round of buttered parchment, then tie a floured cloth over it with string, taking a loop across the top as a handle. Stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in the pan so the base is off the metal.
- "Until done enough"Three and a half hours at a full boil is right for a quart mould; a skewer should come out clean and hot. Let it rest five minutes before turning out or it may slump.
- YieldFour to five, as stated, and it wants a jug of pouring custard or cream. Leftovers reheat by steaming for 30 minutes.
Boiled puddings in a cloth or basin were the backbone of English domestic cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and suet — cheap, firm at room temperature, and forgiving of long cooking — was the fat that made them possible. The "Swiss" in the title is decorative rather than geographical: Victorian cookery writers attached national labels loosely. What is genuinely new here is the coconut. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and after, steamers were bringing whole nuts into British ports in quantity, so a cook could fold a tropical ingredient into an entirely traditional pudding. Commercial desiccated coconut from Ceylon only reached British grocers in quantity from the 1880s and 1890s. The costing — one shilling for a dish serving five — is the sort of detail that made the book useful to a household budgeting week by week.