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Baroncup Pudding
¾ pound chopped suet ¾ pound raisins ¾ pound Five Roses flour ½ pint milk ½ teaspoon salt Mix all the dry ingredients and moisten with the milk. Place in buttered bowl, tie down with cloth and steam for four hours Serve with granulated sugar sprinkled over the pudding.
A plain steamed suet pudding of the cheapest kind: four ingredients, no sugar, no eggs, no leavening. The points below cover the measurements, the fat, and the steaming, which is where these puddings are usually lost.
- The hinge: keep the water boilingA four-hour steam only works if the pot never goes off the boil and never runs dry. Set the bowl on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up its side, keep it at a steady simmer, and top up with boiling water from a kettle as needed. Cold water added mid-steam stalls the pudding and can crack the bowl.
- Half a pint of milkFive Roses was a Canadian flour brand, so the pint here is likely the imperial 20 fl oz, making ½ pint about 1¼ cups. If you read it as a US pint it is 1 cup. Start with 1 cup and add more only until the mixture is a stiff, barely droppable dough, not a batter.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, and it is what gives the pudding its texture; butter or shortening will not behave the same way. Packaged shredded suet works directly; a solid piece should be frozen, then grated, and any membrane discarded.
- No leavening, and that is deliberateThere is no baking powder and no egg, so this sets as a dense, close-grained pudding rather than a cake. Rub or toss the suet through the flour so the shreds stay separate; they melt during steaming and leave the crumb open enough to eat.
- RaisinsThree-quarters of a pound is a heavy fruiting, roughly 2¼ cups. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink to what will become the top of the turned-out pudding.
- Covering the bowlButter a 2-quart pudding basin and cover it with a pleated sheet of parchment or foil under the cloth, pleated so the pudding can rise. Tie the cloth under the rim with string and make a loop across the top as a handle for lifting the hot bowl out.
- Doneness and yieldFour hours is right for a bowl this size; a skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should shrink slightly from the sides. It serves eight, and apart from the raisins the sprinkled granulated sugar is the only sweetening in the dish, so be generous, or serve it with a hard sauce or golden syrup.
- Keeping and reheatingCooled and rewrapped, it keeps a week in the refrigerator and reheats by steaming for about 45 minutes. Slices also fry well in butter.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and it collected recipes submitted by Canadian housewives, which is why so many of them read like this one: four ingredients, no sugar in the body of the pudding, and a name nobody has satisfactorily explained. Suet puddings of this type descend directly from British boiled puddings, which spread once the pudding cloth made it possible to boil a dough without a stomach or a casing to hold it. The economy is the point. Suet was a byproduct of butchering, raisins were among the shelf-stable sweet things a farm pantry could keep, and the whole dish could sit over the back of the stove for an afternoon while the cook did something else. The sugar sprinkled at the table, rather than mixed in, is a small marker of the same thrift.