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Light Steamed Pudding
One cupful of chopped suet, 1 cupful of molasses, I 1/2 cupfuls of fine bread crumbs, 2 scant cupfuls of flour, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 1 cupful of any kind of chopped dried fruit, 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder, 1½ (scant) teaspoonful of soda mixed with 1 cupful of sour milk. Mix, turn into a greased mold and steam for four hours.
A plain boarding-house steamed pudding: suet, molasses, crumbs and whatever dried fruit was in the cupboard. The method is sound, but a few of the assumptions behind it need spelling out.
- The mold must be coveredThe recipe assumes a lidded pudding mold, of the sort such a kitchen would likely have had. Grease the basin, fill it no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with foil or a pleated round of parchment tied under the rim, or the steam condensing off the pot lid will soak the top into paste.
- Keep the water at a bare simmer, and topped upSet the mold on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up its sides. A rolling boil will slop water past the cover; running dry will crack the mold and scorch the pudding. Check and add boiling water every hour.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, and it needs to be grated or chopped very fine and cold so it melts slowly through the batter. Butchers will often supply it on request; packaged shredded suet sold for puddings works directly. Frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is the usual substitute, though the crumb comes out denser.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, not spoiled pasteurised milk, which sours badly. Buttermilk is the standard modern stand-in; a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes also works. The acid is what activates the soda.
- Both soda and baking powderNot redundant. The soda neutralises the acid in the sour milk and the molasses; the baking powder supplies the rest of the lift on its own account. Measure the soda scant as written, since excess gives a soapy, faintly metallic taste that molasses does nothing to hide.
- Bread crumbsFine crumbs, sieved fine enough to disappear into the batter. The recipe specifies only 'fine'; dry crumbs from stale bread are the likelier reading, and not the seasoned packaged kind.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than anything the recipe intends and will dominate the pudding.
- Four hours is not an errorA dense suet batter steams slowly, and the long, gentle cooking is what dissolves the suet through the crumb. Test with a skewer to the centre; it should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the mold. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out.
- Yield and servingA large pudding: the mixed batter runs to something over a quart and a half, so a mold of two quarts or more (larger still if filled only two-thirds, as above), serving eight or so. It wants a sauce, since the pudding itself is not especially sweet: hard sauce, a thin vanilla custard, or warm cream. Leftovers steam or fry up well the next day.
Steamed and boiled suet puddings were a cheap dessert of the English-speaking kitchen for a long stretch of its history, and this is a thrifty American version: the fat is a butcher's offcut, the bulk is stale bread, the sweetening is molasses rather than sugar, and the fruit is whatever dried scraps the household had. It belongs broadly with the boiled plum puddings and Indian puddings that fill nineteenth-century American dessert chapters, all of them long-cooked; the convenience of a pot on the stove over an oven of uncertain heat is one explanation often offered for the preference, though it is inference rather than documented fact. The pairing of sour milk with soda appears constantly in books of this period as a household leavening, and here it sits alongside commercial baking powder -- both are doing chemical work, and no conclusion should be drawn about which the cook trusted. Recipes of this stripe faded from home cooking as beef suet left the domestic larder and as refrigeration reduced the need to find uses for milk that had turned.