Roselle Knott
Mix molasses and suet thoroughly; alternate the flour, fruits and spices, mixing well, adding the soda in a little milk, the last.
Steam three hours and do not remove the cover during the three hours.
Serve with hard or brandy sauce.
Proselle Armotto "Do nothing but eat and make good cheer and praise heaven for the merry year."
This is a steamed suet pudding of the plum-pudding family, printed here as method only — the ingredient list has dropped out, so treat it as instructions to lay over a measured recipe rather than a standalone formula.
- The missing quantitiesNo amounts survive in this entry. A pudding of this type would plausibly run something like 1 cup molasses, 1 cup finely chopped or grated suet, 3 cups flour, 1 lb mixed dried fruit, 1 tsp soda in 1 cup milk and a teaspoon each of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg — but that is a reconstruction offered for guidance, not what Miss Knott wrote.
- SuetBeef kidney fat, sold by butchers and sometimes frozen and shredded. It must be cold and chopped or grated fine so it melts through the batter during steaming; softened or creamed fat gives a greasy crumb. Vegetable shortening substitutes but the texture is heavier.
- Soda in milk, added lastThe soda begins reacting with the acid in the molasses as soon as it is wetted, which is why the recipe has it go in dissolved and at the very end, with the pudding into the steamer promptly. Long delay costs you some of the lift.
- The cover stays onFill the mould two-thirds full, cover tightly with a lid or buttered paper tied down, and set it on a rack in a covered pot of simmering water reaching halfway up the mould. The recipe's instruction not to remove the cover is best read as leaving the steaming enclosed and undisturbed; uncovering lets the temperature drop and can slacken the rise. Check the water level only if you must, and top up with boiling water.
- Three hours is rightUnlike many old timings, this one stands. A dense fruit-and-suet batter needs the full three hours of gentle steam to set the starch and render the fat. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the pudding pulls slightly from the sides.
- Hard sauce and brandy sauceHard sauce is butter beaten with powdered sugar and a spoonful of brandy or vanilla, chilled firm and served in a lump on the hot pudding. Brandy sauce is a thin cooked custard or a sweetened cream sauce with brandy stirred in off the heat.
- Yield and keepingNo quantities survive, so no yield can be given; size the mould to whatever measured recipe you lay these instructions over, filling it two-thirds full. Steamed puddings keep well for a day or two wrapped and refrigerated; reheat by steaming about 45 minutes rather than microwaving.
Roselle Knott was a Canadian-born actress prominent on the American stage around the turn of the twentieth century, and her contribution to this sort of celebrity cookbook is exactly what one expects from the genre: a family standby, a flourish of Shakespeare, and no great concern for whether the printer got the ingredients in. The quotation is Silence's song in Henry IV, Part 2 (V.iii) — "Do nothing but eat, and make good cheer, / And praise God for the merry year" — and the pudding itself belongs to the long English line of boiled and steamed suet puddings that carried over to North America and settled in as a standard winter dessert — molasses rather than sugar for sweetening, dried fruit for richness, and beef suet doing the work butter does in a cake. Soda dissolved in milk as the leavening suggests a date after chemical raising agents had become household staples but while cooks still relied on molasses to supply the acid.