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Christmas Pudding
2 eggs. 1 cup molasses. 1/2 cup milk. 1½ cups currants 1½ cups raisins 1½ cups suet ½ cup sugar ½ cup molasses 1 cup milk No. 2 4 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1 teaspoon mixed spice.
Boil or steam 3 hours. Sauce to taste.
A plain suet pudding of the sort meant to be mixed in the morning and left over the water while other work went on. The proportions are generous — this is a full-sized pudding for a table of ten or twelve.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon of each is a homemade baking powder, roughly equivalent to two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. Mix it through the flour dry and get the pudding into the water promptly, as the gas begins escaping the moment the liquid goes in.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded or grated rather than measured as a solid block — 1½ cups is about 6 oz. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Frozen and coarsely grated works best; softened suet smears into the flour and the pudding turns heavy.
- Mixed spiceA British-Canadian blend, typically cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and a little clove and ginger. Any pumpkin-pie or speculaas blend stands in for it.
- Steaming vesselThis quantity makes roughly 2½ quarts of mixture, so use a 3-quart pudding basin or covered mould, or divide it between two smaller ones. Butter it, fill it no more than three-quarters, and cover with pleated parchment and foil, or a floured cloth tied under the rim. Set it on a trivet or folded towel in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the basin.
- Watching the waterThree hours will boil a pot dry. Keep a kettle going and top up with boiling — not cold — water so the pudding never stops cooking. A pudding that goes off the boil sinks and stays sodden.
- DonenessA skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy rather than liquid at the top. Let it stand five to ten minutes before turning out, or it may collapse.
- Sauce"Sauce to taste" means a hard sauce (butter creamed with icing sugar and a little brandy or vanilla) or a hot vanilla or lemon sauce. Serve both if the pudding is the whole dessert.
- KeepingWrapped tightly, the pudding keeps a week in the refrigerator and months frozen. Re-steam a whole pudding an hour, or slice it and fry the slices in butter.
This is the thrifty end of the Christmas pudding tradition — no eggs, no brandy in the batter, no candied peel, just currants, raisins, suet and molasses bound with flour. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and drew heavily on recipes sent in by users of its flour across Canada, so its puddings reflect what was in a prairie or Ontario pantry rather than what an English cookery authority would prescribe. Molasses does much of the sweetening work that sugar does in richer versions, and the soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening belongs to the era after chemical raising agents had become cheap and widely available in North American kitchens. Boiled and steamed puddings suited wood and coal ranges, where a pot could sit for hours over a modest fire while the oven was needed for other things.