Home › Boiled Puddings › Carrot Pudding (No. 2)
Carrot Pudding (No. 2)
1½ cups Five Roses flour 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup beef suet 1 cup stoned raisins 1 cup currants 1 cup grated raw potatoes 1 cup grated raw carrots 1 teaspoon soda.
Steam or boil for 3 hours.
A terse formula in the style of its era: a list of cupfuls and one line of method. The grated raw potato and carrot supply nearly all the moisture, so resist the urge to add liquid.
- Assembling itMix the flour, sugar and soda, work in the suet, then stir in the grated vegetables and the fruit. The batter should be stiff and barely droppable, not pourable; the potato releases water as it steams.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded in some butchers and supermarkets. Fresh suet needs the papery membrane stripped off and should be grated or chopped fine while very cold. Packaged shredded suet, which is coated in flour, can be used cup for cup.
- SodaOne teaspoon of soda is baking soda. There is no sour milk or molasses in the mix and brown sugar is only mildly acidic, so little rise should be expected; this is a dense pudding by design, not a cake.
- Stoned raisinsRaisins with the seeds removed. Ordinary seedless raisins are the direct equivalent, no preparation needed.
- The vesselFill a greased 2 to 2½ quart pudding basin or mould two-thirds full, or divide between two smaller moulds, cover with greased parchment and foil pleated across the centre, and tie down. A floured cloth is the older method and gives a darker skin. Stand the basin on a rack in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up.
- Three hoursThe time is right for a single large pudding. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top up with boiling water so it never runs dry. Individual moulds need about an hour.
- Yield and servingServes eight to ten. It expects a sauce: hard sauce, a caramel or brown sugar sauce, or thin cream.
- KeepingSteamed suet puddings improve after a few days wrapped and refrigerated, and reheat by steaming for 45 minutes to an hour.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed by the hundreds of thousands to Canadian households that bought its flour. Carrot pudding of this kind is a thrift descendant of English plum pudding: grated root vegetables stand in for part of the fruit and all of the eggs, sweetening and moistening a batter held together by suet. Puddings like it were standard Canadian Christmas fare well into the twentieth century, and the inclusion of a second numbered version here suggests the editors were collecting variants readers had sent in. The absence of spice is notable.