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Raspberry Pudding
½ pound bread crumbs 3 ounces suet (chopped fine) 6 ounces raspberry jam 4 tablespoons sugar ¾ teaspoon soda Buttermilk.
Put the soda, bread crumbs and suet into a basin. Add the jam and sufficient buttermilk to moisten (it must not be too moist). Put in a well-greased pudding basin. Cover with greased paper and steam 2 hours. Serve with melted jam for sauce.
A plain steamed suet pudding of the boiled-pudding school, leavened by soda reacting with buttermilk. Nothing here is dangerous, but a few of the terms and proportions need translating.
- Weights in cups½ lb fresh breadcrumbs is roughly 4 cups loosely packed (dry crumbs would be about 2 cups and far too absorbent). 3 oz suet is about ½ cup chopped; 6 oz raspberry jam is about ½ cup.
- "Basin" means two different thingsThe first basin is just a mixing bowl. The "pudding basin" is the steaming mould — a 1½-quart heatproof bowl with sloping sides. Grease it well and it will turn out cleanly.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, is still sold by butchers and as packaged shredded suet. Frozen grated butter is one common substitute, though the crumb comes out softer and less open.
- Soda and buttermilk are a pair¾ teaspoon soda needs the acid of real cultured buttermilk to lift the pudding; sweet milk will leave a soapy taste. Mix and get it into the mould promptly, as the gas begins working at once.
- "Not too moist" is the hingeThe mixture should just hold together and drop reluctantly from the spoon. Too much buttermilk and two hours of steam produce a heavy, wet pudding that will not slice.
- Steaming setupCover with greased parchment (pleated, so it can rise) and foil or a tied cloth, stand the bowl on a trivet in a deep pot, and add boiling water to halfway up the sides. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- The sauce"Melted jam" means jam warmed with a spoonful or two of water until pourable. Sieve it if you object to the seeds.
- YieldSix modest servings. Leftovers re-steam well for 20 minutes; a microwave works but dries the edges.
Boiled and steamed puddings occupy their own chapter in nearly every North American cookbook of the early twentieth century, and the Five Roses book — published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour — is no exception, even though this particular pudding uses no flour at all. Its logic is thrift: stale bread, a little butcher's fat, and a jar of last summer's raspberry jam make a hot dessert from things already in the house. The soda-and-buttermilk leavening reflects a period when soured milk was a constant byproduct of home butter-making. Puddings of this kind descend from the English pudding-cloth tradition, and the greased basin with a paper cover is the tidier late-Victorian refinement of it.