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Christmas Pudding (No. 3)
7 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup ground suet 1 cup sugar (white) 1 cup molasses 2 cups raisins 1½ cups currants Note-See also plum puddings for further Christmas puddings. 1/2 cup lemon peel. 3 eggs. 3 teaspoons (heaping) cream of tartar. 4 teaspoons (heaping) soda. 3 teaspoons (heaping) ginger. 2 teaspoons salt. 2 teaspoons lemon extract. Nutmeg and cinnamon to taste.
This is a formula rather than a full recipe: the Five Roses book prints it as an ingredient list and leaves the method to the general instructions for boiled puddings that surround it. Read the neighbouring plum pudding entries, as the note directs, before starting.
- What is missingAs printed there is no leavening, no salt, no spice, no egg and no boiling time, and the only liquid is the cup of molasses. Seven cups of flour to one cup of fat will not come together into a batter on molasses alone. Use the method and proportions of liquid and seasoning from a complete boiled pudding recipe and treat this list as the fruit-and-flour skeleton.
- Ground suetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded or chopped fine rather than melted. Butchers will still sell it on request and packaged shredded suet is sold in some shops; frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is the usual stand-in, though it gives a denser crumb.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, small black raisins, not fresh red or black currants. They are sold beside the raisins.
- MolassesCooking or fancy molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity. The molasses is doing colour and flavour work as much as sweetening.
- Boiling, not bakingThe page gives no method, but puddings of this kind are boiled or steamed: packed into a greased basin or a floured cloth, covered, and set over simmering water in a covered pot with the water kept topped up. A mixture of this size will want several hours, and cooks were told to keep the water at the boil throughout.
- FlourFive Roses was a Canadian household flour, milled from western hard wheat. Plain all-purpose flour is the nearest modern equivalent; bread flour will make the pudding tough.
- YieldSeven cups of flour plus three and a half cups of fruit is a very large pudding, or two to three moulds of ordinary size. Christmas puddings were made in quantity and kept, so dividing the mixture between smaller basins is closer to the intent than one enormous one.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour, which may be why the book carries several numbered Christmas puddings in a row: each is often supposed to have come from a different contributor, with the editors simply setting them side by side rather than choosing between them. The boiled or steamed suet pudding is the older English form of the Christmas pudding, descended from the spiced meat-and-fruit pottages of the medieval kitchen and firmly sweet by the nineteenth century; the beef suet is traditionally said to be the last surviving trace of the meat. Cloth-boiling gave way to the pudding basin over the nineteenth century, and puddings were made weeks ahead because the long steaming and the sugar and fruit let them keep and, it was generally held, improve.