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English Suet Pudding
1 t baking powder 1 scant t salt 1/2 C sugar ½ t cinnamon Mrs. M. R. Miller. 1 rounded C chopped beef suet 1/2 C cut-up raisins Enough cold water to make soft dough like buiscuit Put into buttered tube pan, lay a thin cloth over, put cover on, and steam forty-five minutes. Serve hot with caramel sauce, as follows: 12 C light brown sugar ½ C granulated sugar Butter size of walnut 1 T flour Add water and boil until it thickens.
A steamed suet pudding of the plainest English type, set down in shorthand by a cook who assumed her reader already knew the proportions. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so read it carefully before starting.
- The flour is missingNo flour appears in the pudding list, yet the method calls for "a soft dough like biscuit." The amount is genuinely absent from the original rather than something that can be deduced from it; it has to be judged by feel against the stated soft-dough consistency.
- The caramel sauce quantity"12 C light brown sugar" against 1½ cups granulated is almost certainly a misprint for 1/2 C. Twelve cups of brown sugar with a walnut of butter and a tablespoon of flour is not a sauce.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, and it is what makes the pudding light rather than greasy — it melts late, leaving steam pockets. Ask a butcher, or buy shredded packaged suet. Grate it cold and toss it with a little of the flour so it stays separate.
- Abbreviationst is teaspoon, T tablespoon, C cup. "Butter size of walnut" is roughly a tablespoon.
- Steaming, not bakingThe tube pan sits on a rack in a large covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up its sides. The thin cloth under the lid catches condensation so it does not drip back and waterlog the top. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water as needed.
- Forty-five minutes is shortThat is enough only for a shallow tube pan holding a modest batter. A deeper mould wants 1½ to 2 hours. Test with a skewer to the centre; the crumb should be springy, not gummy.
- The sauce"Add water" is unspecified — start with about a cup for the corrected sugar quantities, and boil only until it coats a spoon. It thickens further as it cools, and flour-thickened caramel turns pasty if reduced too far.
- YieldA standard tube pan of this pudding serves six to eight. It reheats well by re-steaming for fifteen minutes; it is dry and dense straight from the refrigerator.
Suet puddings are the oldest surviving branch of English boiled pudding cookery, descended from the medieval practice of stuffing a seasoned mixture into an animal's stomach or gut and simmering it. The pudding cloth, in use from the seventeenth century, freed the cook from needing a casing at all, and by the nineteenth century the mould or basin covered with cloth — exactly what Mrs. Miller describes — had become the standard domestic method. Cinnamon and raisins with a caramel or hard sauce mark this as the sweet, everyday end of the tradition rather than a Christmas pudding, which would carry far more fruit, spirits and a long aging. Its appearance in a community cook book of this kind is unremarkable for the period: beef suet was cheap and plentiful, the pudding needed no oven, and such books routinely recorded recipes in the compressed, assumption-heavy style of one experienced cook writing for another.