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Economical Pudding
1 cup chopped suet. 1 cupful golden syrup. 1 cupful milk. 2 cupfuls chopped raisins. 3 cupfuls flour. 1 teaspoonful soda (put in the milk). 2 teaspoonfuls cream of tartar put in the dry flour. Boil three hours and a half.-Miss E.T.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the English type, with the leavening supplied by soda and cream of tartar rather than baking powder. The method is the part the recipe assumes you already know.
- It is boiled, not bakedButter a pudding basin or mold big enough to leave a third of it empty; the mixture comes to something close to two quarts. Cover tightly with pleated parchment and foil, or tie in a floured cloth. Set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, cover, and keep at a bare simmer for the full three and a half hours, topping up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and increasingly by mail order. Shredded packaged suet works directly; a solid piece should be chilled hard, stripped of membrane, and grated or chopped fine. Frozen grated butter is a common substitute, though it gives a denser crumb.
- Golden syrupAn inverted cane sugar syrup, still sold under the Lyle's name. Light corn syrup is the closest common stand-in, though it is less flavorful; a mix of corn syrup with a spoonful of molasses comes nearer.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis pairing is homemade baking powder. One teaspoon soda to two of cream of tartar is roughly equivalent to four teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. Keeping them separate until the batter comes together, as directed, matters here because the reaction starts the moment they meet in liquid.
- RaisinsTwo cups chopped is a lot of fruit for three cups of flour, and the pudding will be heavy. Tossing the chopped raisins in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them from sinking to what will become the top.
- What is missingNo salt and no spice are given. A half teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of mixed spice or cinnamon are entirely in keeping with the style and improve a pudding that is otherwise very plain.
- Yield and servingServes eight to ten. Turn it out hot and serve with a hard sauce or a thin custard. It reheats well by steaming for half an hour.
Boiled suet puddings were the workhorse dessert of English and Anglo-American cooking for the better part of two centuries, and "economical" here means exactly what it says: flour, fat, dried fruit and syrup, no eggs, no butter, no sugar bought by the pound. The pudding cooks in a covered pot on top of the stove, which mattered in kitchens where oven heat was expensive or unreliable, and it shares a lineage with the far richer Christmas plum pudding rather than with the baked puddings that came later. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, and the terse attribution to "Miss E.T." is typical of the book's method: recipes were collected as they were written down for friends, with steps everyone was assumed to know left out entirely.