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WELSH PUDDING, MODERN (sometimes called Quaker's Pudding)
Take half a pound of fresh beef suet free from skin and fibre. Chop it small, and mix with it half a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs, half a pound of sugar, the grated rind of a large fresh lemon, and the juice of two. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, and bind the mixture together with two eggs well beaten. Put it into a buttered mould, place it in boiling water, and keep it boiling quickly until done enough. Turn it out carefully, and serve. Time to boil the pudding, four hours. Probable cost of pudding, 1s. or 1s. 2d. Sufficient for six persons.
A plain boiled suet pudding sharpened with lemon: no flour, no dried fruit, just suet, crumbs, sugar and citrus. The whole thing hangs on keeping the water at a steady boil and never letting it drop below the mould.
- Keep the water upThe mould sits in boiling water for hours, and the level will fall. Top up only with boiling water from a kettle — cold water stops the cooking and can give you a heavy, sodden centre.
- SuetFresh beef suet from a butcher, chopped fine or grated after chilling, is what is meant. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, works at the same weight. Grated frozen butter is a poor substitute; it melts out rather than steaming the crumbs open.
- BreadcrumbsSoft crumbs from a day-old white loaf, not dry sandy crumbs from a packet, which absorb differently and will make the pudding dense.
- The mouldButter a 1.5-quart pudding basin, cover it with pleated foil or parchment tied under the rim, and stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in the pan with water to two-thirds up the side. The recipe itself calls for a mould; boiling in a tightly floured cloth is another method of the period and also works.
- Four hoursFour hours is a long boil even by the standards of Victorian suet puddings. This mixture contains no raw flour and no fruit to soften, so in a covered basin it will very likely be cooked through well short of that; check it and judge for yourself rather than assuming the full time is needed.
- Sugar and lemonHalf a pound of sugar to half a pound of crumbs is very sweet by current taste — 6 oz is closer to modern expectation. The recipe asks for the rind of one large lemon and the juice of two; since fruit varies, add the juice of one, taste the raw mixture, and go to two only if it needs it.
- BindingTwo eggs is a light bind for a pound and a half of dry ingredients. If the mixture will not hold together when pressed in the hand, a third egg or a spoonful of milk is in keeping with the method.
- ServingSix portions, as stated. It wants a sauce: sweetened lemon or a thin pouring custard. Rest the mould a few minutes before turning out so the pudding pulls away from the sides.
Cassell's calls this the "modern" Welsh pudding, apparently to distinguish it from an older dish of the same name — a baked lemon-and-butter mixture in pastry, closer to a lemon cheesecake — versions of which appear in eighteenth-century English cookery books. The nineteenth-century version has been reworked as a boiled suet pudding, a cheap and forgiving format in a coal-fired kitchen, where a pot could sit on the hob all afternoon while the range was busy with other work. The alternative name, Quaker's pudding, is one of many such labels attached loosely to plain boiled puddings; what it was meant to signal is unclear, and no Quaker origin is documented. The price note — a shilling or so for six people — is the kind of costing Cassell's gave throughout, aimed at a household budget.