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Suet Pudding (Eggless)
½ cup suet (chopped fine) 1½ cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon (heaping) baking powder 4 tablespoons molasses ½ cup raisins 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon cloves 1 teaspoon allspice Sweet milk to make stiff batter.
Steam 1½ hours. This pudding is very nice by making it with sour milk and ½ teaspoon baking soda, instead of sweet milk and baking powder.
A plain steamed pudding of the eggless, wartime-thrifty type, leavened chemically rather than with eggs. The instructions assume you know how a steamed batter should look and how to rig a basin over water.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher, chopped very fine or grated while cold; packaged shredded suet (including vegetarian versions) works and needs no preparation. Half a cup is roughly 2 oz. Do not substitute melted butter, which will not give the same open, springy crumb.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured milk in the variation. Expect to need about ½ to ⅔ cup to bring the batter to a stiff, dropping consistency that holds its shape on the spoon.
- Sour milk and sodaThe alternative is not modern soured supermarket milk. Use buttermilk, or milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup, and omit the baking powder entirely when using the soda.
- SpicingThree level teaspoons of ground spice in 1½ cups of flour is assertive by current taste. A teaspoon each of cinnamon, cloves and allspice will read as very heavily clove-forward; halving the cloves is reasonable.
- VesselGrease a 1-quart pudding basin or heatproof bowl, fill it no more than two-thirds, and cover with pleated parchment and foil tied under the rim. Without a cover, condensation will soak the top.
- SteamingSet the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, lid on, at a bare simmer for the full 1½ hours. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; if the pan runs dry the pudding scorches and the basin can crack.
- Doneness and yieldThe pudding is done when it is risen, firm to a light press and a skewer comes out clean. It serves four to six, turned out hot and eaten with a hot sauce, custard, or simply cream.
Eggless recipes crowd the pudding chapters of North American cookbooks from the 1910s and 1920s, when eggs were dear and wartime conservation campaigns urged households to save wheat, meat and fat for export. The Five Roses book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional collection of recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, is full of such economies, and this one leans on baking powder or the older soda-and-sour-milk pairing to do the lifting an egg would otherwise provide. Suet puddings themselves are far older, descending from the boiled and steamed puddings of British cookery, where a cloth or basin over a kettle turned a modest amount of flour, fat and dried fruit into a hot dish for a large family. The two-way leavening note is a period habit worth noticing: soured milk was an everyday byproduct in a house without steady refrigeration, and cooks were expected to switch between the two systems without a second recipe.