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Fruit Pudding (No. 1)
(Used by me for many years, and I can vouch for its deliciousness.) 1 cup Five Roses flour 2 cups bread crumbs lb. shredded suet ½ cup brown sugar ¼ pound mixed peel Juice of 1 lemon Peel of ½ lemon (shredded fine) 1 teaspoon (heaping) ginger ½ teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon nutmeg 1 teaspoon baking powder 2 eggs (well-beaten).
Mix all dry ingredients together with the eggs, adding a small quantity of milk if too dry. Put in baking powder last.
Place in mould or pudding cloth and boil 3 hours. Turn out and sprinkle top with white sugar. -Mrs. E. Wright, Holmstead Rd., Langley, B.C.
Note-Always wet and flour well inside of pudding bags.
A plain steamed suet pudding of the everyday sort — no dried fruit beyond candied peel, and leaned on ginger for its character. It reads as written, with a few gaps worth filling before you start.
- The missing suet quantityThe original prints only "lb. shredded suet" — a fraction has dropped out in typesetting. Against 1 cup flour and 2 cups crumbs, ½ lb (about 225 g) is a plausible reading, and ¼ lb would give a drier, more cake-like result. Choose deliberately rather than guessing at the stove.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour, close to modern all-purpose. Substitute cup-for-cup; no bread flour needed, since the crumbs and suet do the structural work.
- SuetShredded beef suet from a butcher, or packaged shredded suet where sold. Vegetable suet works. Do not substitute butter — it melts out early and the crumb collapses instead of setting around the fat.
- Mixed peelCandied citrus peel, usually orange and lemon, sold in tubs at Christmas. A quarter pound is roughly ¾ cup chopped. If it has hardened in the cupboard, chop it and toss it with a spoonful of the flour so it disperses.
- Bread crumbsSoft fresh crumbs from day-old bread, not the dry sandy kind in a canister. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and will leave the pudding heavy; if that is all you have, expect to add noticeably more milk.
- The order of mixingThe instruction to put the baking powder in last is the hinge. It gives it the shortest possible sit before heat reaches it, which matters in a batter that will spend three hours in a mould.
- Mould and clothFill a greased 1.5–2 quart basin or mould about two-thirds full, cover with pleated parchment and foil, and tie down. If using a cloth, follow the note at the end — wet it, wring it, and flour the inside heavily, or the batter welds to the fabric.
- BoilingStand the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a covered pot with water reaching halfway up, at a bare simmer. Check every 45 minutes and top up with boiling water; a pot that runs dry cracks the basin and scorches the pudding.
- Yield and servingServes about six to eight. Rest it five minutes before turning out so it firms at the edges. The sprinkle of white sugar is the finish as written, though hard sauce or a thin custard is a usual accompaniment.
Five Roses was the flour brand of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and its cook book, first issued in 1913, was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which is consistent with this one arriving with a name and a street address in Langley, British Columbia, and a personal vouching for its deliciousness. Boiled suet puddings of this kind descend from the British pudding-cloth tradition, and they persisted in Canadian kitchens well after ovens became standard equipment. The absence of raisins or currants here is worth noticing: it is a plainer relation of the Christmas pudding, spiced heavily with ginger and carrying its only luxury in a quarter pound of candied peel.