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Suet Pudding
1 cup sour milk ½ cup molasses 1 cup suet 2 eggs 1 cup fruit 1 teaspoon soda 2 cups Five Roses flour.
Steam about 1 hour. Serve with currant and raisin sauce.
A plain steamed pudding of the kind that once ran alongside the boiled dinner. The list is terse even by Five Roses standards, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, grated or chopped fine and measured loosely packed. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet; frozen suet grates far more easily than chilled. Cold butter is a workable substitute in equal weight, though the crumb will be softer and less springy.
- Sour milk and sodaThis is the acid that activates the teaspoon of soda, not spoiled milk. Use buttermilk, or add a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. Dissolve the soda in the sour milk and get the pudding into the steamer promptly, since the lift begins at once.
- "1 cup fruit"Genuinely unspecified. In a book of this date it most likely means raisins or currants, seeded and floured so they do not sink; chopped dates or mixed dried fruit work equally well. Fresh fruit would throw the moisture off.
- MolassesOrdinary unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and much stronger. Together with the fruit it supplies all the sweetening the pudding gets.
- The mouldA 1 to 1.5 quart pudding basin or coffee can, greased, filled no more than two-thirds. Cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down, or a floured cloth, so condensation does not drip into the batter.
- Steaming and timingSet the mould on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up, and keep it at a steady simmer, topping up with boiling water as needed. One hour is optimistic for a full quart mould; expect 1.5 to 2 hours and test with a skewer, which should come out clean, and a centre reading of about 200F.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Let the pudding stand ten minutes before turning out, and serve hot with the currant and raisin sauce, or with any warm sweet sauce; the flavour is better on the second day, reheated by steaming.
- FlourFive Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian flour; plain all-purpose flour, spooned and levelled, is the usual modern stand-in. No baking powder is called for and none is needed.
Steamed suet puddings came to Canadian kitchens straight from British practice, where a fat-enriched batter tied in a cloth and boiled in the same pot as the dinner was one of the cheapest hot sweets a household could produce. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, gathered contributions from ordinary cooks across the country, which is why the instructions assume so much: everyone knew what sour milk was for and how a pudding cloth was tied. Suet was usual rather than butter because it was a cheap butcher's by-product, and because its higher melting point tends to give a lighter, more open crumb than solid butter. It is served here with a currant and raisin sauce, in keeping with the common practice of pairing boiled puddings with a sweet syrupy sauce.