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Cocoa Fruit Pudding
1 cup figs finely chopped 24 cups soft bread crumbs 1 cup brown sugar 2 eggs + cup milk teaspoon salt Chop suet, figs and bread crumbs in meat chopper.
Add remaining ingredients, and steam three hours. Serve with hot chocolate sauce, or cream sweetened and flavored. See colored illustration, Plate VII, opposite.
A steamed suet pudding of the old English type, dressed up for an American chocolate company's book. The ingredient list as printed has suffered in transcription, so read the method first and reconcile the two before you begin.
- Gaps in the printed listThe method calls for suet, but no quantity is given; a pudding of this size would want somewhere in the region of a cup of chopped suet, though the book does not say. Cocoa appears in the title and nowhere in the ingredients — perhaps a quarter to a third of a cup sifted with the dry ingredients, but the original does not say, and that is a guess rather than a reading.
- Garbled measures"24 cups soft bread crumbs" is a mangled fraction, 2¼ or 2½ cups; "+ cup milk" is likewise a lost fraction, perhaps ½ cup. The salt is printed with no fraction at all and was probably a part of a teaspoon; read it as a scant teaspoon at most for this quantity.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidney, and it is what gives a steamed pudding its texture. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Butter can stand in but the crumb will be denser and shorter.
- The meat chopperA hand-cranked grinder. A food processor pulsed in short bursts does the same work; the aim is to reduce the suet to small flecks distributed through the crumbs, not to cream it.
- Steaming, not bakingFill a buttered mold or covered basin two-thirds full to leave room for rise, set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, cover, and keep the water at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it drops — if the pot runs dry the pudding scorches.
- Three hours is not paddingLong gentle steaming is what melts the suet slowly enough to set the crumb around it. Cutting the time short leaves a heavy, greasy center. The pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Yield and servingProbably enough for six to eight; the recipe gives no yield. Unmold while hot; steamed puddings stick as they cool. It reheats well by steaming again for 30 to 40 minutes.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, and like other chocolate-manufacturer cookbooks it exists to put cocoa into as many household dishes as possible "— including, here, a steamed suet pudding that had gotten along without chocolate for centuries. The form is the English plum-pudding family: suet, breadcrumbs, sugar, eggs and dried fruit, tied in a cloth or sealed in a mold and boiled or steamed for hours over the kitchen fire. Figs stand in for the raisins and currants of the older recipes, and dried figs were available in American groceries by 1900. The reference to a colored illustration on Plate VII is a reminder of what these promotional cookbooks were: handsomely produced, and designed to make the manufacturer's tin look indispensable.