Home › Desserts › Dark Steamed Pudding
Dark Steamed Pudding
One cupful of finely chopped beef suet, 1 cupful of molasses, 1 cupful of cold water, 2 cupfuls of flour, 1 teaspoonful of baking-soda, ½ teaspoonful of salt, 2 teaspoonfuls of ground cinnamon, 1 teaspoonful of ground cloves. Sift all the dry ingredients together and mix thoroughly. Steam three hours and serve with a hard sauce flavored with vanilla. If there is any left, slice the next day and serve with a hot liquid sauce flavored with lemon. This is a very cheap dessert and a universal favorite. By adding citron, raisins and currants it may be made a very good substitute for the regular holiday plum pudding.
A plain molasses suet pudding of the sort that once stood in for plum pudding on a tight budget. The method is compressed almost to nothing in the original, so a few things need spelling out.
- The missing stepThe instruction only says to sift and mix the dry ingredients. In practice: combine suet, molasses and water, then stir in the sifted flour, soda, salt and spices just until smooth. Overworking it makes the pudding tough.
- Beef suetRaw kidney fat from a butcher, chopped fine or grated while cold; it melts slowly and leaves the crumb light. Packaged shredded suet works, and frozen grated butter or vegetable shortening will substitute at some cost in texture.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the cloves. The molasses is also the acid that activates the soda, so do not swap in a neutral syrup.
- The moldA 1.5 to 2 quart pudding basin or tube mold, greased, filled about two-thirds, and covered tightly with a lid or with pleated foil tied down. The pleat matters because the pudding climbs as it steams.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to halfway up the sides, cover, and keep at a bare simmer for the full three hours. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; letting the pot run dry scorches the bottom of the pudding.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer to the center should come out clean and the pudding should pull slightly from the sides. Rest ten minutes before unmolding. Serves six to eight.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and confectioners' sugar with vanilla, served cold against the hot pudding. The "hot liquid sauce" for leftovers is unspecified here; a cornstarch-thickened sugar-and-water sauce with butter and lemon would be the usual reading.
- Turning it into plum puddingThe original gives no quantity for the citron, raisins and currants. About a cup of fruit total works; toss it with a spoonful of the measured flour so it stays suspended, and allow perhaps another half hour of steaming.
Steamed suet puddings were the English answer to a household with no reliable oven: a covered pot over any fire produced a dessert that flour, fat and sweetening alone could carry. Molasses did the sweetening in American kitchens through the nineteenth century because it cost a fraction of refined sugar, and it is what gives this pudding both its color and its name. The frank note that it makes "a very good substitute for the regular holiday plum pudding" places the recipe squarely in its genre of economy cookery, where the expensive parts of a festive dish, the dried fruit and candied peel, are treated as optional additions rather than the point. The suggestion to slice leftovers the next day and serve them with a hot sauce fits that same economy: a dense steamed pudding keeps well.