Home › W › Mrs. Thomas Whiffen
Mrs. Thomas Whiffen
GUEST PUDDING
¼ lb. stale bread I ¼ lb. finely chopped meat I ¼ lb. granulated sugar I ¼ lb. marmalade 3 eggs Mix bread crumbs, suet and sugar well together Add the marmalade and lastly the eggs (well beaten). Grease a pudding boiler well, and put in the mixtures; steam for three hours, then turn out on a dish and garnish with marmalade.
This should be sufficient for four people.
I have made this many times.
Joves truly Blanche ekipe (hos Thos hiffer)
A plain English steamed suet pudding, sweetened with marmalade and bound only by eggs — there is no flour and no raising agent, so the texture is dense and bready rather than cakey.
- The quantitiesThe four principal ingredients are each a quarter pound: bread, suet, sugar and marmalade, roughly 4 oz / 115 g apiece. Three eggs bind the lot.
- Suet, not chopped meatThe mixing instruction calls for suet, and that is what the pudding needs — hard beef kidney fat, finely chopped or grated. Shredded packet suet works directly; vegetable suet gives a slightly softer crumb. Cold grated butter can stand in, but the pudding will be heavier.
- Stale breadUse genuinely dry bread and grate or process it into coarse crumbs. Fresh bread packs into a paste and the pudding steams solid; dried commercial crumbs are too fine and absorb badly.
- The pudding boilerThis is a lidded metal pudding mould or a china basin. Grease it well, fill no more than three-quarters, and cover a basin with pleated baking parchment and foil tied under the rim so no water enters.
- SteamingSet the mould on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan, add boiling water to halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full three hours, topping up with boiling water. Three hours is not padding — an eggy, flourless mixture needs long gentle heat to set without curdling.
- Turning outLet it stand five minutes off the heat before inverting, or the outer crust tears. Warm a few spoonfuls of marmalade with a little water to make the garnish spoonable.
- YieldFour servings, as the original states. A pouring custard or cream is the usual accompaniment and keeps the sweetness in check.
Steamed suet puddings were the backbone of English domestic cooking through the nineteenth century: cheap fat, stale bread and whatever sweetening the house had. Marmalade gives this one its character. Blanche Whiffen, born in England and long resident on the American stage, was among the contributors to charity cookbooks of this kind.