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Suet Pastry
1/2 lb. (2 cups) flour 4 heaping tablespoonfuls chopped suet 1 teaspoonful baking powder Cold water 1/4 teaspoonful salt Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder into an earthenware bowl, rub the suet well into them, then make into a stiff paste with cold water, adding it gradually. This paste may be boiled for two hours in a cloth or mold, or rolled out and used for fruit, sweet or savory puddings, or roly-polys.
A plain British suet crust, given in the ratio cooks memorised: twice as much flour as fat. The recipe assumes you know what to do with it afterwards, so the notes below fill in the parts left unsaid.
- The hinge: keep everything cold, and handle it littleThe hinge: handle it little -- Suet pastry works because solid flecks of fat stay suspended in the dough and melt during the long steaming, opening the crumb. Suet is harder and higher-melting than butter, so it is comparatively forgiving of warm hands, but overworking develops the gluten and gives a dense, heavy crust, so rub in quickly and stop as soon as the water brings it together.
- Suet, and what to use insteadThis means beef kidney fat, hard and dry, which butchers once sold in the lump for chopping at home. Packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) is the direct substitute; failing that, frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater comes closest, though it melts sooner and gives a softer crust.
- The measurementsHalf a pound of flour is about 2 cups of modern all-purpose, and the book says so. The suet is given only by the spoonful, and 'heaping' is unreliable with a chopped or shredded product: four heaped tablespoons may come to anywhere between about 2 and 4 oz. Traditional suet crust runs about 2:1 flour to fat by weight, so weigh out 4 oz if you can.
- WaterNone is specified because it depends on the flour. Expect roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of cold water for this quantity, added a spoonful at a time until the dough is stiff enough to hold a thumbprint without cracking.
- Boiled in a cloth or moldA pudding cloth is a square of scalded, floured cotton tied round the dough; a mold means a pudding basin covered with pleated paper or foil and tied under the rim. Either sits on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan of simmering water reaching halfway up, topped up with boiling water as it evaporates. The recipe's two hours is for the paste itself and suits a jam or fruit pudding; a raw meat filling needs longer.
- Rolling and liningRoll to about 1/4 inch. For a basin pudding, cut a quarter out of the round to use as the lid and press the larger piece into the greased basin, sealing the join with wet fingers. For a roly-poly, spread with jam or a savoury filling, leave a border, roll up and seal the ends.
- Baking powderOlder suet crusts often used none at all. The teaspoonful here lightens the texture and is worth keeping, but the pudding should go into the pan soon after mixing rather than sitting about.
- YieldEnough to line and lid a 1 1/2-pint pudding basin, serving four to six, or to make one roly-poly about 10 inches long.
Suet crust is the workhorse pastry of the British kitchen, and it survived into the twentieth century because it needed no oven: a pot of boiling water over any fire would cook it, which mattered in households where baking meant a trip to the bakehouse or a fire built up specially. Beef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, was cheap and plentiful in a period when butchers broke down whole carcasses, and it tolerates the long moist heat of steaming far better than butter. The same paste covered a steak and kidney pudding, wrapped a jam roly-poly, or capped a dish of stewed fruit: it is a foundation, not a dish.