Home › Recipes › Steamed Bread Pudding
Steamed Bread Pudding
2 cups fresh or stale bread crumbs 1/2 cup chopped suet 1 cup hot water 1 cup flour 1 cup molasses 1 cup currants 1 teaspoonful soda 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1/2 teaspoonful powderered cinnamon 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1/2 teaspoonful grated nutmeg Few blanched almonds 1 egg THIS pudding will be wonderfully light and delicate if one essential point is closely attended to--the water must boil steadily, without a moment's intermission until the pudding is done.
Pour hot water over Bread crumbs, add molasses, suet, flour, soda, spices, currants, salt and egg well beaten. Grease a mold and decorate it with almonds. Turn batter into prepared mold, cover with greased paper and steam steadily for two and a half hours. Serve with hot milk or sweet sauce.
A suet pudding built on bread crumbs and molasses and steamed for two and a half hours. The booklet’s one emphatic instruction, that the water must never stop boiling, is most of the technique.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys. A butcher will have it, and it wants grating or shredding while very cold. Packaged shredded suet sold for puddings works as it comes. Frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is the usual stand in and gives a slightly denser pudding.
- The currants are driedA cup of currants here means dried Zante currants, small and black and closer to a tiny raisin than to a berry. Fresh red or black currants are a different fruit and will not behave.
- Soda and molasses react on contactThere is no baking powder in this. The soda works against the acid in the molasses, and the reaction begins the moment they meet. Mix, fill the mold and get it over the water without stopping to tidy up.
- Rigging the moldAny straight sided heatproof basin of about six cups will do. Grease it, press the blanched almonds against the bottom so they finish on top when it is turned out, cover with greased paper and tie or crimp foil over that. Stand it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water halfway up the sides.
- Top up with boiling water onlyTwo and a half hours will take the level well down. Add water before the pot runs low, and add it boiling. Cold water stops the cooking and the pudding sets heavy. That is what the recipe means by not a moment’s intermission.
- ReheatingA pudding of this kind keeps and reheats by steaming for half an hour. Of the two serving suggestions, the hot milk is the plainer and the better; a sweet sauce on top of a cup of molasses is a great deal of sugar.
The steamed pudding came to American kitchens from Britain and survived here longer in its cheap, dark, spiced form than in its showy one. Everything in the ingredient list points away from an oven and towards a pot: a covered mold over boiling water needed only a steady fire, while an hour of even oven heat was expensive in a wood or coal range and unreliable in any of them. Suet was what a household already had, arriving free or nearly free with the meat, and molasses was the sweetener that cost least. The spices are the plum pudding set — ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg — in a version with no brandy, no candied peel and no months of ageing. What it does have, and what ties it to the rest of this booklet, is two cups of bread crumbs. A kitchen that baked its own bread generated crumbs continuously, and the pudding pages are where they went.