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Marmalade Pudding
¼ pound Five Roses flour 2 ounces moist sugar 2 ounces suet (chopped finely) 3 ounces marmalade 1 egg 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 tablespoon milk.
Mix well together and boil in buttered mould 2 hours.
A small British-style steamed suet pudding scaled for one mould. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a pudding basin goes into the pot, so most of what follows fills in that assumed knowledge.
- The measurements in cups¼ lb flour is about 1 cup (115 g), 2 oz moist sugar about ¼ cup packed, 2 oz chopped suet a generous ⅓ cup, and 3 oz marmalade about 4 to 5 tablespoons. It fills a 1-pint (500 ml) basin comfortably.
- Moist sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar — light brown sugar is the closest modern equivalent. Ordinary white granulated will work but gives a paler, drier crumb.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, chopped or grated fine. Packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) is the direct substitute; frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is a common stand-in, though it melts sooner and tends to give a denser pudding.
- The batter is deliberately stiffOne egg and one tablespoon of milk against a cup of flour produces a dropping-to-stiff mixture, not a pourable batter. The marmalade contributes moisture; if it is a thick, chunky cut the mixture may be too dry to fall from the spoon, in which case add milk a teaspoon at a time.
- "Boil in buttered mould" means steam"Boil in buttered mould" -- Puddings of this kind were cooked in water rather than in the oven, either partly immersed or set over boiling water in a covered pot; steaming is the usual modern reading. Butter the mould, fill it no more than two-thirds full, and cover it tightly so condensation cannot get in. Stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in a covered pot with boiling water reaching partway up the sides.
- Two hours, and topping upThe time suits a pint basin, but the pan will need boiling water added once or twice. Never let it run dry, and top up with boiling rather than cold water, which checks the cooking.
- The baking powderMuch of its lift will be spent well before two hours are up, and the suet melting through the mixture accounts for a good deal of the texture. Increasing it is unlikely to give a taller pudding.
- Yield and servingFour small servings. Turn out while hot, and serve with custard, a thin marmalade sauce loosened with hot water, or cream.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and like many Canadian household books of the early twentieth century it carries a long British inheritance — boiled and steamed puddings, held together with suet and cooked in a basin over water, a standard sweet course in a kitchen with limited oven space and a fire that was lit anyway. Marmalade puddings belong to that family of preserve-sweetened steamers (jam roly-poly, treacle sponge) in which a jar from the shelf does the work of both sugar and flavour in winter, when fresh fruit is gone. Orange marmalade is traditionally associated with Scotland, where Seville oranges were cut coarse and boiled into a bitter preserve, and the pudding keeps that bitterness as its point of interest: without it the mixture is simply sweetened suet and flour.