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Town Pudding
Shred six ounces of suet very finely, and free it from skin. Mix with it a small pinch of salt, six ounces of moist sugar, half a pound of chopped apples (weighed after being pared and cored), half a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs, and half a tea-spoonful of finely-cut lemon-rind. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, and press them very tightly into a buttered basin which they will quite fill. Tie a floured cloth over the pudding, and boil it four hours. It will not require any moisture. Turn it out carefully, and send sweet sauce or wine sauce to table with it. Time to boil, four hours. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the most economical sort: no eggs, no milk, no flour, and the apples supplying all the moisture it gets. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher must be stripped of membrane and shredded fine, or grated frozen. Packet shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) works directly and is already floured; 6 oz is about 1 1/2 cups loosely packed.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar, damper and darker than white. Light brown soft sugar is the closest modern match, and its moisture matters here in a pudding with no added liquid.
- The basin and the clothA pudding basin is a deep, steep-sided bowl, usually ceramic; something in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 pints suits this quantity, though the recipe does not say. Butter it well, fill it to the rim as directed, then tie a floured cloth over the top as instructed, or cover with pleated baking parchment and foil tied under the lip, the pleat allowing for any slight expansion.
- "It will not require any moisture"This is the hinge. The mixture is deliberately dry and packed tight so it steams in its own apple juice; adding milk or egg gives a sodden, collapsing pudding rather than the close, sliceable crumb intended.
- Boiling versus steamingBoiled, strictly, meant the cloth-covered basin immersed in boiling water; the usual modern compromise is a pan of water reaching two-thirds up the side, on a trivet or folded cloth so the basin does not touch the base. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top up with boiling water; the pudding is ruined if the pan runs dry.
- Four hoursFour hours is what the recipe asks, the long boil letting the suet render and the breadcrumbs set into a firm pudding. A stovetop pressure cooker is generally reckoned to cut such times to roughly a third, with a slightly softer texture.
- Turning outLet it stand five minutes off the heat, run a knife round the rim, invert onto a warmed dish. Turned out too soon it slumps.
- Sauce and yield"Sweet sauce" means a simple sugar-and-butter sauce or a thin custard; wine sauce is the same enriched with sherry or Madeira. Six servings, as stated, and it reheats well by re-steaming.
Suet puddings of this kind were the backbone of English domestic cookery through the nineteenth century, and the "probable cost, 9d" that Cassell's attaches to entries of this sort is the point of this one: breadcrumbs and apples instead of flour and eggs, a substantial hot pudding for six at a few pence a head. The name may distinguish it from the countless puddings named for counties and villages, though Cassell's, which drew its entries from many hands and earlier books, rarely explains its titles. What the recipe suggests, though it does not say so, is a household in which stale bread was unlikely to be thrown away and beef suet may have cost little or nothing alongside the joint, and in which a pudding could be set to boil in the morning and left largely alone.