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Australian Pudding
6 ounces Five Roses flour 4 ounces suet 4 ounces sugar 4 ounces sultanas Mixed peel and ginger to taste 1 tablespoon baking soda ½ 1/2 pint warm milk.
Mix all dry ingredients together, except the soda which is dissolved in the milk. Add latter to the mixture. two hours.
A plain suet pudding of the boiled-in-a-basin school, written in the shorthand of a book that assumed every reader had made one before. Two things need attention before you start: the leavening quantity and the fact that the method never actually says to boil it.
- The soda is almost certainly a misprintA tablespoon of baking soda against 6 oz of flour is roughly six times a working amount and will taste soapy and metallic. A teaspoon is the sensible reading, and with no acid in the batter a teaspoon of baking powder does the job better.
- Weights, not volumesThe ounces here are weight: 6 oz flour is about 1⅓ cups, 4 oz sugar about ½ cup, 4 oz sultanas about ¾ cup. Use a scale if you have one; the ratio of flour to fat to sugar is the whole structure of the pudding.
- Half a pintThis is a Canadian book using Imperial measure, so ½ pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. Warm it to blood heat only — hot milk melts the suet before it can be worked into the flour.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard kidney fat, grated or shredded fine and kept cold. Butchers will still sell it; packaged shredded suet is sold as a baking ingredient in British and Commonwealth groceries. Frozen grated butter is the usual substitute, though the crumb comes out shorter and less springy.
- Mixed peel and gingerCandied citron and orange peel, chopped, plus either preserved stem ginger or ground dried ginger. Around 2 oz peel and a teaspoon of ground ginger suits this quantity.
- "Two hours" means boiled or steamedThe recipe gives a time but never says how. Fill a greased pudding basin of about 1½ quarts two-thirds full, cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down, and stand it on a trivet in a pot of simmering water reaching halfway up the basin. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water so it never goes dry.
- Testing and turning outA skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy, not liquid. Rest it five minutes before inverting, or the top tears away.
- Yield and servingServes five or six. It wants a thin custard, a hard sauce, or plain cream; on its own the crumb is dry by modern taste.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Keewatin to sell Five Roses flour, and its recipes were largely contributed by the Canadian housewives who used it — which may be why the instructions are so clipped, and why a pudding recipe can forget to mention boiling. Boiled suet puddings were a common everyday sweet in British and Canadian kitchens because they needed no oven, only a pot on the range, and they stretched a small quantity of dried fruit a long way. The name is the interesting part: "Australian" here signals nothing Australian in the ingredients, and why the label was attached is not recorded. It should not be read as evidence of origin.