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Date Pudding
2 cups bread crumbs 1 cup Five Roses flour ½ cup suet (chopped fine) 2 cups dates (chopped) ½ cup sugar Pinch of salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 eggs (well beaten) Milk to moisten.
Put in well-buttered bowl, and steam from 3 to 6 hours. Serve hot with cream or sweet sauce.
A classic steamed suet pudding of the Canadian milling-company type: the flour is the brand the book was written to sell, and the method assumes a covered bowl in a pot of simmering water for most of an afternoon.
- The hinge: steam, never boil dryThe bowl sits on a rack or folded cloth in a pot with water halfway up its sides, at a bare simmer, lid on. Top up with boiling water as it drops; if the pot boils dry the bowl cracks and the pudding scorches.
- "Milk to moisten"Aim for a thick dropping batter that reluctantly falls from the spoon — roughly ¾ to 1 cup of milk, depending on how dry the crumbs are. Dates hold a lot of water, so err on the stiff side rather than the slack.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher, chilled hard and chopped or grated fine, about 2½ oz. Packaged shredded suet works directly; frozen grated butter is a common substitute, though it gives a denser, less open crumb.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from stale bread, not dry commercial crumbs, which are far heavier by volume and will make a brick. Tear or grate day-old bread and measure loosely.
- DatesPeriod dates came pressed in blocks and were quite dry; today's soft Medjool or Deglet Noor are wetter and sweeter. Reduce the milk slightly and you may want less than the full ½ cup sugar.
- Bowl and coverA 2½ to 3 quart pudding basin, buttered, filled no more than two-thirds. Cover with buttered parchment and foil, pleated to allow rise, and tie or crimp tightly so condensation cannot drip in.
- TimingThree hours is enough for a pudding of this size and is the better choice; the longer end of the range suits a larger, denser bowl. Test with a skewer to the centre — it should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy.
- Yield and servingServes 8. Let it stand 10 minutes before turning out, then serve hot with cream or a hard sauce, custard, or a lemon or brown-sugar sauce. It reheats well by steaming 30-45 minutes.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and assembled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which is why its pudding chapter reads like a survey of what was actually being steamed on ordinary stoves in the early twentieth century. Steamed suet puddings came to Canada straight out of British domestic cookery, where they solved a real problem: a pudding could cook on the same fire as the rest of dinner, needing no oven, and the enclosed bowl made the most of scarce fuel. Dates belong to the same era's pantry as raisins and currants — dried fruit shipped in from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern growers and often sold pressed into slabs, cheap enough to be a common source of sweetness and fruit flavour in a Canadian winter.