Home › Village Receipts › Raisin Pudding
Raisin Pudding
One cup chopped suet, one cup of whole wheat flour, one-half cup of milk, one cup of sugar, one cup of raisins, one teaspoon of baking powder, two eggs. Put in a well buttered mould and steam two hours.
— Miss Emily Cole
A plain steamed suet pudding of the sort that appeared on village tables all winter. The proportions are sound; only the fat and the steaming setup need translating.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, and it should be chopped or grated fine while cold so it stays in flecks rather than melting into a paste. A butcher will supply it; packaged shredded suet also works. One cup is roughly 4 oz. Frozen grated butter is the usual substitute, though the crumb comes out heavier and less open.
- Mould and coveringA 1 1/2- to 2-quart pudding basin or lidded steamed-pudding mould, buttered as directed, filled no more than two-thirds; the quantities here make roughly four and a half cups of mixture. If the mould has no lid, cover with buttered parchment and foil, pleated once across the top to allow rise, and tie it down.
- The hinge: steam, do not boil drySet the mould on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, cover, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as needed; if the pot boils dry the pudding scorches, and cold water added mid-cook stalls the steaming.
- Baking powderA single teaspoon in this much flour gives only a modest lift, which is intended in a suet pudding. Use a modern double-acting powder and mix the batter just until combined so the crumb does not toughen.
- Whole wheat flourOlder whole wheat was often coarser and thirstier than today's. If the batter looks stiff enough to stand up in a mound rather than fall heavily from the spoon, add milk a tablespoon at a time.
- DonenessTwo hours suits a mould of this size. A skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should shrink slightly from the sides. Rest ten minutes before turning out or it may split.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Steamed puddings of this kind were commonly served with a hard sauce, a thin sweet pudding sauce, or plain cream.
- Making aheadSteamed puddings keep well wrapped for several days and reheat by steaming for 30 to 40 minutes.
Steamed suet puddings came to American kitchens straight out of the English tradition, where a floured cloth or a tin mould over a pot of water let a cook produce a substantial sweet dish without an oven — a genuine advantage in a farmhouse where the range was already crowded or the fire was banked low. Raisins kept in a box in the pantry long after apples had gone soft, and suet was a by-product of home butchering rather than something bought. The whole wheat flour is worth noting: refined white flour had become cheap and widely preferred by the later nineteenth century, so choosing whole wheat here may reflect thrift or the contemporary enthusiasm for less-refined grain. Recipes signed with a neighbor's name, as this one is, are characteristic of a community cookbook, which records who in a place was known for what.