Suet Pudding
1 quart flour. 2 teacups suet, chopped fine. 1 teaspoonful salt. Mix the suet with two-thirds of the flour, reserving the rest of the flour to roll the dough in. Put in a cloth and boil one hour.--Mrs.B. Suet Pudding. 1 pint milk. 3 eggs, well beaten. 1/2 pound finely chopped suet. 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger. 1 teaspoonful salt.
Add flour gradually, till you have made it into a thick batter. Boil two or three hours, and serve with hot sauce.--Mrs.P.W.
Two boiled suet puddings from different contributors, both written in the shorthand of cooks who had made them a hundred times. Neither gives a yield, and the first omits an ingredient outright.
- The missing liquidMrs. B's version lists only flour, suet and salt, with no water or milk. Flour and suet alone will not form a dough; enough cold water to bring it together (roughly a cup to a cup and a quarter for a quart of flour) is assumed. This is a plain suet crust, not a sweet pudding.
- Teacups and quartsA teacup of the period is usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup, though the book never defines it, so two teacups of chopped suet is roughly 1 1/2 cups, or about 6 to 7 oz. A quart of flour, measured by volume as they did, is about 4 cups, or roughly 1 lb.
- SuetBeef kidney fat, sold shredded and floured in some markets and available frozen or by request from a butcher. Buy it hard, keep it cold, and grate rather than chop if you want it to disperse evenly. Packaged shredded suet is already dusted with flour, so reduce the reserved flour slightly.
- The pudding clothScald the cloth, wring it out, and flour the inside heavily before filling; the damp flour forms the skin that keeps water out. Tie with room for expansion, and lower into water already at a rolling boil. Top up only with boiling water, or the pudding stops cooking and turns heavy.
- Or use a basinA greased pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil, set on a rack in a covered pot of simmering water, gives much the same result with far less anxiety, though it may want a little longer than the boiled cloth.
- "A thick batter"Mrs. P. W.'s pudding takes flour to feel rather than to measure. With a pint of milk and three eggs, expect somewhere between 3 and 4 cups of flour: thick enough to fall from the spoon in a lump, not to pour.
- Two or three hoursThat range is not laziness. A batter pudding of this size needs the long boil to set the suet and cook the flour through; pulled early it is greasy in the middle. Test with a skewer, which should come out clean and hot.
- "Hot sauce"Typically a sweet pudding sauce served warm: butter and sugar thinned with boiling water and flavored with wine, brandy or nutmeg. The pudding itself contains no sugar, so the sauce is doing the sweetening.
- YieldNeither recipe states a yield; each would plausibly serve six to eight. The first, being unsweetened, is a plain suet crust that could as easily be eaten savory with meat as served with sauce.
Boiled suet puddings tied in a floured cloth are one of the oldest surviving English kitchen techniques, generally traced to the seventeenth century, when the pudding cloth freed cooks from having to stuff a batter into an animal's gut. They crossed to Virginia with English cookery and stayed, because they need no oven — useful in a kitchen where the fire was already occupied by a pot of boiling water. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why the same dish appears twice, side by side, in two households' versions: one a plain crust of flour and fat, the other enriched with milk, eggs and ginger. The absence of sugar in both is worth noting. Sweetness came at the table, from the sauce, and a suet pudding could be sent up as a side dish with meat or as a dessert depending on what was poured over it.