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Vegetable Pudding, Economical and Good
Shred six ounces of good beef suet very finely. Mix with it half a pound of the inside of baked potatoes, and add half a pound of the red part of carrots finely scraped, two ounces of candied peel finely shredded, four table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, and a little salt. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, and moisten with one well-beaten egg. Tie the pudding in a cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and boil quickly till done enough. Turn it out carefully, and serve with sweet sauce, to which a little brandy may be added if liked. Time to boil the pudding, two and a half hours.
A Victorian boiled pudding built on vegetables rather than flour, which makes the handling of the cloth and the dryness of the potato more important than usual. Read the notes on the cloth first — this mixture has no flour to hold it together.
- The hinge: a floured cloth and water at a full boilScald the pudding cloth, wring it out, and dust the inside generously with flour before filling; the flour sets into a skin that keeps water out of a mixture with no batter to protect it. The water must be at a rolling boil when the pudding goes in and must never drop below it, or the outside turns to sludge.
- "The red part of carrots"Period recipes routinely distinguish the outer, sweeter flesh from a paler, tougher central core, which is why the recipe specifies it. With modern carrots the distinction is much less marked, so in practice scrape or grate the whole carrot finely — about 8 oz (225 g) trimmed weight, on the fine side of a box grater.
- Baked, not boiled, potatoHalf a pound is the scooped-out flesh of about one to two large baking potatoes after baking. The point is dryness: boiled or steamed potato carries too much water and the pudding will not hold. Rice or sieve it while warm and let it cool before mixing.
- Moist sugarThis is unrefined soft brown sugar, still damp from the syrup. Light or dark soft brown sugar is the direct equivalent; four tablespoons is about 2 oz (55 g).
- SuetSix ounces of beef suet shredded fine, or the same weight of packet shredded suet, which already contains a little flour and behaves well here. Vegetarian shredded suet works, though the flavour is flatter.
- Candied peelTwo ounces of candied citron, orange or lemon peel, chopped small. Buy whole capped peel if you can; the pre-diced supermarket tubs are largely sugar syrup and add sweetness rather than the resinous citrus note the recipe wants.
- Topping up the panTwo and a half hours at a hard boil will take a lot of water. Keep a kettle on and top up with boiling water only, keeping the pudding covered; cold water stops the boil and leaves a heavy band through the middle.
- A basin instead of a clothIf you would rather not wrestle a cloth, a greased pudding basin of about 1.5 pints, covered with pleated baking parchment and foil and steamed rather than boiled, turns out more reliably; allow at least the same time, and expect steaming to take somewhat longer.
- Yield and sauceServes about six as a modest pudding. "Sweet sauce" is unspecified here and could be any of several sweetened sauces of the period; a plain sweet white sauce — milk thickened with a little flour or cornflour, sweetened and flavoured with vanilla or lemon — suits it well. Add the brandy off the heat.
Vegetable puddings of this kind belong to the long English tradition of stretching a suet pudding with whatever was cheap and starchy, and they were common in the nineteenth century as potatoes and carrots became cheap, widely available staples. Carrot has an old claim on the sweet course: carrot puddings appear in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, and the vegetable's natural sweetness is part of the appeal. The word "economical" in the title is doing real work — it points to a pudding of Christmas-pudding shape and technique without the expensive raisins, currants and flour, with the candied peel carrying the dried-fruit note. Puddings on the same logic — root vegetables in place of fruit and flour — were promoted again under twentieth-century wartime rationing, most conspicuously in the Second World War, when such substitutions were official advice rather than household thrift.