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Herbie's Pudding
1½ cups bread crumbs 1 cup buttermilk ½ cup suet 1 cup sugar 1 cup raisins 1 cup currants 1 tablespoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon soda 1 cup Five Roses flour.
Steam 2 hours.
A plain steamed pudding of the old Canadian kitchen: no eggs, no butter, and buttermilk and soda doing the lifting. The list gives quantities and a steaming time and nothing else, so the method needs filling in.
- The hinge: a covered mould and gentle waterGrease a 1½ to 2 quart pudding basin or mould and fill it no more than two-thirds, then cover tightly with a lid, or greased parchment and foil tied under the rim. Stand it on a rack in a pot with boiling water halfway up the sides, keep the water at a bare simmer for the full 2 hours, and top up with boiling water as it falls. Water getting in, or the pot boiling dry, are the two commonest ways this fails.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose flour of the period, milled from hard spring wheat. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the substitute; one cup is about 130 g.
- SuetBeef kidney fat, finely chopped or grated while very cold — ½ cup is roughly 60 g. Butchers still sell it on request, and packaged shredded beef or vegetable suet works as sold. Frozen grated butter is the usual stand-in, though the pudding will be softer and less springy.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old bread, not dry commercial crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and will give a dense, pasty pudding. Tear or grate the bread; 1½ cups is about 75 g.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small dark raisin, not fresh red or black currants. Rinse and dry the currants and raisins, then toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour so they suspend rather than sink.
- SodaBaking soda, 1 teaspoon, activated by the acid in the buttermilk. Mix the batter and get it into the mould promptly, as much of the lift is lost if the batter is left to stand.
- CinnamonA full tablespoon is assertive by modern standards and will dominate the fruit. Two teaspoons is closer to current taste, and the recipe gives no salt — ½ teaspoon improves it noticeably.
- Yield and servingServes about 6 to 8. Rest 10 minutes before turning out, and serve hot with a hard sauce, caramel sauce, or thin custard; a plain steamed pudding of this kind is dull without one. Leftovers reheat well by steaming slices for 10 minutes.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and it drew its recipes from the housekeepers who used it — hence the number of dishes carrying somebody's first name, of which Herbie is one. Nothing more is known of Herbie than the title; named puddings in such collections are often said to commemorate the contributor or the family member who liked it best, though the practice is not documented here. The recipe itself belongs to the great class of boiled and steamed suet puddings that dominated British and Canadian dessert cookery before home ovens became reliable, since a pot of simmering water on the stove needed no temperature control. What marks this one as a thrift recipe is the absence of eggs and butter: stale bread, buttermilk left from churning, dried fruit and beef fat, leavened with soda rather than eggs, all of it steaming away unattended while the rest of the meal was cooked.