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Fig Suet Pudding
Mix together 2½ cupfuls of sifted flour, I level teaspoonful each of soda, salt, mace, allspice and cinnamon and 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder.
Put through a fine sieve, then add ½ cupful of finely chopped suet, 1 pound of figs cut fine, 1 cupful of molasses, 1 cupful of milk. Turn into well-buttered pound baking-powder cans or molds of the same size and steam for two hours and a half. Serve with any good liquid sauce flavored with vanilla.
A steamed batter pudding of the plain, thrifty sort — molasses for sweetness, suet for richness, dried figs for body. The method is straightforward; most of what needs translating is the equipment and the leavening.
- The molasses and soda are a pairThe level teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the cup of molasses, and the baking powder gives a second lift during the long steam. Do not substitute honey or syrup for the molasses without dropping the soda, or the pudding may taste soapy.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and often needing to be ordered. Shredded packaged suet works and needs no chopping; freeze a solid piece for twenty minutes and it grates cleanly. Vegetable suet substitutes give a softer, less flaky crumb but behave the same way in the steamer.
- Pound baking-powder cansThese were seamed tin cans of roughly two cups' capacity, kept and reused. Substitute two-cup pudding basins, straight-sided ramekins or heatproof glass jars. Do not steam in modern food cans, which are lined with a coating not meant for prolonged heat.
- Fill and coverThe recipe assumes it, but fill each mold no more than two-thirds and cover it — buttered parchment tied down, or foil pleated across the top. Uncovered molds take on condensation and the pudding goes sodden at the crown.
- SteamingStand the molds on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up their sides, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full two and a half hours. Top up with boiling water as it drops; letting the pot run dry is the one thing that ruins the pudding.
- FigsA pound of dried figs, stems removed, chopped small. If yours are hard, steep them in hot water for ten minutes and drain well before chopping.
- The liquid sauce"Any good liquid sauce" means a thin pouring custard or a hard-sauce-style butter and sugar sauce loosened with cream — not a syrup. Vanilla is the flavoring specified; a spoonful of brandy is period-appropriate.
- Yield and keepingThis makes roughly four two-cup puddings, serving eight to ten. Steamed puddings improve after a day and reheat well: re-steam a covered mold for thirty to forty minutes.
Suet puddings steamed in a mold are the English boiled-pudding tradition adapted to the American stovetop, and by the early twentieth century the cloth-tied pudding bag was increasingly, though by no means entirely, being displaced by tin cans and metal molds. The instruction to use "pound baking-powder cans" is the telling detail: in a household that bought baking powder, coffee and lard in tin, the empty cans were free molds of a known and repeatable size, and cookbooks of this period cite them as casually as we would cite a loaf pan. Figs and molasses both point to a cheap sweet, and dried figs arrived pressed in slabs or layered in wooden boxes from Smyrna. The heavy hand with mace, allspice and cinnamon is characteristic of the whole family of steamed winter puddings, where spice does the work that butter and eggs do in a richer cake.