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Poor Man's Pudding
One cup each of New Orleans molasses, sweet milk, chopped suet, and raisins chopped fine, three cups of flour, one teaspoon of salt and one of soda; season with cinnamon and cloves to taste. Steam three hours. Serve with any pudding sauce.
— Mrs. Thomas Steele
A plain steamed suet pudding of the sort that lived in every farmhouse kitchen: no eggs, no butter, no sugar beyond what the molasses carries. The method matters more than the list.
- The hinge: steam, never boil dryThis is a large pudding; use a greased 2-quart or larger pudding mold or covered bowl (or divide between two smaller ones), filled no more than two-thirds full, covered tightly with a lid or pleated foil tied down, and set on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the side. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it goes; if the pot runs dry the pudding scorches and the mold can crack.
- New Orleans molassesThe term generally meant a good-quality Louisiana cane molasses, full-flavored but not blackstrap. Modern dark ("robust") molasses is the closest match; blackstrap is far more bitter.
- Soda, not baking powderThe one teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the molasses and sour nothing else. Use baking soda straight, sift it with the flour, and get the pudding into the steam promptly once mixed.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers on request and sometimes frozen and shredded. Chop or grate it fine while cold, tossing it with a spoonful of the flour so the pieces stay separate. Frozen grated unsalted butter is the usual stand-in, though it gives a denser crumb.
- Flour and consistencyThree cups of modern all-purpose flour into one cup each of milk and molasses gives a very stiff batter — spoonable, not pourable. That is correct for a steamed pudding; resist thinning it.
- SaltOne teaspoon to three cups of flour is a normal proportion, and is there to keep a molasses pudding from tasting flat.
- Three hours, and how to tellThe long steam is genuine — it is what melts and disperses the suet. A skewer to the center should come out clean and the pudding should pull very slightly from the mold. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out.
- Yield and sauceServes eight to ten in small wedges; it is rich. "Any pudding sauce" in this period means a hard sauce (creamed butter and sugar, flavored), a hot vanilla or lemon sauce thickened with cornstarch, or simply cream. Leftovers reheat well in the steamer or sliced and fried in butter.
"Poor man's pudding" is a name attached to any number of dishes across the nineteenth century, some rice- or bread-based, others, like this one, taking their sweetness from molasses rather than sugar and their richness from suet rather than butter or eggs — the cheapest fat and the cheapest sweetener in a northern farmhouse. Molasses arrived by the barrel and kept indefinitely; suet was a byproduct of butchering that cost nothing if you kept a beef. This pudding is a near relation of the boiled plum puddings and Indian puddings of the same books, and of New England's brown bread, which shares the molasses-and-soda chemistry. The attribution to Mrs. Thomas Steele is typical of a community cookbook: recipes were collected from named contributors as much to record the household as the dish.