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Mamma's Favorite Pudding
1 cup molasses 1 cup suet (Molasses) 1 cup currants and raisins (1/2 each) 2 teaspoons baking powder Five Roses flour to make very stiff.
Put in a floured bag and steam constantly for 3 hours.
A plain steamed suet pudding of the sort that lived on the back of the stove all afternoon. The recipe assumes you already know how a pudding cloth works, and it leaves two things unsaid that matter.
- The missing liquidMolasses is the only wet ingredient named, and one cup will not carry a cup of suet, two cups of fruit and enough flour to be "very stiff." Comparable steamed puddings often call for about a cup of milk or water; the original is genuinely silent on it, so add liquid by feel until the batter is a stiff dough that holds its shape on the spoon.
- "Very stiff" means stiffA steamed pudding in a cloth has no mould to hold it, so the mixture must be firm enough to sit in a mound. Too slack and it spreads into a flat, sodden disc. Figure roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of flour and stop when a spoon stands briefly upright.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded or grated fine — not chopped in chunks. Butchers will still supply it on request, and packaged shredded suet is sold for baking. Frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh. Cold grated butter or vegetable shortening will substitute, though the crumb comes out heavier and less light.
- The floured bagA square of cotton or linen, scalded in boiling water, wrung out, then floured thickly on the inside — the wet flour forms a skin that keeps water out. Tie loosely, leaving room for the pudding to swell by a third. A greased pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil does the same job with less anxiety.
- Steam constantlyThe instruction means what it says: the water must never go off the boil and never run dry. A dropped simmer partway through gives a heavy, damp centre. Keep a kettle going and top up with boiling water, never cold.
- Baking powder with molassesTwo teaspoons is generous. Molasses is acidic, so many period recipes used soda instead; with baking powder the rise happens early, which is fine here since the pudding sets slowly in steam. Do not let the mixture sit before it goes into the pot.
- Currants and raisinsA cup of each — two cups of dried fruit in total, which is a lot for one pudding and part of the point. Toss the fruit with a spoonful of the flour so it does not sink.
- Yield and servingServes about eight. Turn it out hot and serve with a hard sauce, a lemon sauce or plain cream; a cold steamed pudding is dense and wants reheating in the steamer for twenty minutes.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to buyers of its flour, which is why the flour in this recipe is named and none of the other ingredients are. Its contents came largely from Canadian housewives who sent in their own receipts, and the title here — "Mamma's Favorite" — is a fair sign of that origin: a family formula, passed along with no more precision than the family needed. Boiled and steamed suet puddings were the everyday sweet of British and Canadian kitchens well into the twentieth century, cheap in fuel because they cooked over a pot already on the stove and forgiving of a cook busy with other work. Molasses did the sweetening in households where sugar cost more, and the dried fruit made it festive enough for a Sunday. The pudding cloth, older than the pudding basin, is generally traced to seventeenth-century English kitchens, and it survived in North American home cooking long after moulds became common.