Home › Puddings › Suet Pudding
Suet Pudding
1 cup suet chopped fine 1 cup sweet milk 2 cups seeded raisins 1 cup molasses 2 cups Gold Medal flour 1 cup currants 1/4 cup each citron, lemon and orange peel 1 teaspoon each soda, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg Mix the ingredients and steam for two hours. Serve with hot or liquid sauce
A plain steamed pudding of the Christmas type, built on suet, molasses and dried fruit. Nothing here is unsafe; the only things that need translating are the fat, the milk and the steaming setup.
- SuetThis means raw beef kidney fat, sold by butchers and easiest to handle frozen and grated on the coarse side of a box grater. Packaged shredded vegetable suet works, as does an equal weight of frozen unsalted butter grated the same way, though butter gives a slightly denser crumb.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh whole milk, specified because many recipes of the period called for sour milk or buttermilk and the leavening depended on which you used. Here the acid comes from the molasses, which is what the teaspoon of soda is reacting with.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the spices. Light or "mild" molasses gives a paler, sweeter pudding.
- Candied peelA quarter cup each of citron, lemon and orange peel means candied peel, chopped small. Citron is the hardest to find now; more candied orange, or a mix of orange and lemon, is a fair replacement.
- SaltThe list omits it. Add half a teaspoon of salt to the flour or the spices taste flat.
- Steaming, in practiceThe batter runs to roughly two quarts, so use a 3-quart mold or basin, or divide between two smaller ones. Grease it, fill no more than two-thirds full, cover tightly with a lid or a doubled sheet of foil tied down, and set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the mold. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops; if the pot boils dry the pudding scorches.
- DonenessA skewer to the center should come out clean and the center should read about 200F. A single large mold may want longer than the stated two hours; divided among smaller molds it will be done in about an hour.
- The sauce"Hot or liquid sauce" appears to distinguish a poured sauce from hard sauce, the stiff butter-and-sugar paste that melts on the hot slice. A simple hot sauce of butter, sugar, a little flour and boiling water, flavored with vanilla or lemon, would suit.
- Yield and keepingServes 8 to 10. Steamed puddings improve after a day or two; cool in the mold, wrap, refrigerate, and re-steam 30 to 45 minutes to serve.
Suet puddings came to American cookbooks out of the British boiled-pudding tradition, where a batter bound with chopped beef fat was steamed in a cloth or basin over the same fire that cooked the rest of the meal. The heavy fruit-and-spice version, as here, is a close relative of Christmas pudding, and by the time this book appeared such puddings were largely holiday dishes. Its presence in a flour company's cookbook is not accidental: booklets like this were promotional, printed to put a brand name into every recipe a household used. The molasses-and-soda pairing is the other period marker, a cheap leavening partnership that predates the widespread use of commercial baking powder in home baking.