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Suet Pudding (C suet chopped very fine C)
1 C suet chopped very fine 1 C molasses 1 C sour milk 1 egg • 1 t soda 1 t nutmeg 2 t cinnamon 1 C raisins 3½ C flour 12 t cloves Place in one-pound coffee cans and put in kettle of boiling water and keep boiling for about three hours. Serve with hard sauce. 2 C flour Pinch of salt
A steamed molasses suet pudding of the sort that cooked away on the back of the stove while dinner was eaten. Two lines in the text are garbled, so read them before you start.
- The clove measurement is a misprint"12 t cloves" cannot be right — twelve teaspoons of ground cloves would be inedible. Read it as ½ teaspoon, which is in scale with the nutmeg and cinnamon.
- The last line belongs to another recipe"2 C flour Pinch of salt" trails after the instructions and is not part of this pudding; it appears to be the head of the next entry, run together in typesetting. Ignore it.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and often needing to be ordered. Chop or grate it while very cold so it stays in distinct flakes rather than smearing; those flakes are what give the pudding its texture. Frozen grated suet or shredded packaged suet works, and 1 cup is about 4 oz.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means milk that has clabbered naturally, which was unpasteurised. Use buttermilk, or 1 cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes. The acid is what activates the teaspoon of soda — this pudding has no other leavening.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter, and not sorghum unless you want its sharper flavour.
- The coffee cansModern cans are lined and not intended for heating, so use 1-quart pudding basins, straight-sided heatproof jars or metal moulds instead. Grease them well and fill only two-thirds full.
- Cover before steamingThe original does not say whether the cans were covered. Tie on a doubled layer of greased parchment or foil, pleated to allow rise, or the condensing steam will waterlog the top. Stand the moulds on a rack or folded cloth in the kettle so they are not against the metal, and keep the water at a steady low boil coming halfway up the sides. Top up with boiling water as it falls.
- Time and donenessThree hours is right for moulds of this size. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the pudding has pulled slightly from the sides; steamed puddings are forgiving of extra time but not of a kettle that boils dry.
- Hard sauce and yieldHard sauce is butter creamed with about twice its volume of powdered sugar and flavoured with vanilla, brandy or nutmeg, chilled firm and served in a spoonful on the hot pudding. The batch fills two moulds and serves ten to twelve. It reheats by steaming for 30 minutes and keeps well wrapped for several days.
Suet pudding is the plain-cooking descendant of the English boiled pudding, which is generally said to have crossed to America in the colonial period and stayed on tables long after fresh fruit desserts were available year-round. What makes this a distinctly American version is the molasses-and-sour-milk-and-soda trio: cheap sweetening, the by-product of a churn, and the chemical leavening that spread through home baking after saleratus became a pantry staple in the mid-1800s. Steaming in salvaged coffee cans is the sort of homely detail that assumes neighbours with the same tins on the same shelf. Puddings like this were dessert for a large family on a winter Sunday, made from what was on hand and set to cook without watching.