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Paste for Boiled Puddings
1 pound of flour 6 ounces of butter 1 heaping teaspoon of baking powder Water Take out two large tablespoons of the flour to work up the paste, and mix the rest with the baking-powder. When these have been well-mixed, rub in the butter, and stir in as much water as will make a rather stiff paste. Flour a pastry-board, and roll out the paste to half an inch in thickness. Fold the pastry in three, and roll out again, when it will be ready for use. Keep the board and rolling-pin well floured with the flour that was taken from the pound at first. This pastry can be used equally well for either fruit or vegetable pies. If the paste is to be kept several days before using it should be wrapped in a napkin and put in a cool place so no crust will be formed. In making paste everything should be cold and the dough handled as little as possible.
A butter crust standing in for the usual suet paste, meant to line or wrap a pudding that will be boiled or steamed rather than baked. The proportions are workable as written; the vagueness is all in the water.
- Weights in cupsA pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups scooped and levelled, though weighing is safer here since the whole point of the recipe is a stiff, dry paste. Six ounces of butter is one and a half sticks.
- "As much water as will make a rather stiff paste"Expect somewhere between 2/3 and 1 cup of ice water, added a little at a time. Stiffer than a pie dough: it has to hold a shape against boiling water for an hour or more without slumping.
- Cold is the hingeThe last line is the instruction that matters. Butter rubbed in while cold leaves flakes that steam apart in the pudding; butter worked warm gives a dense, greasy crust that turns heavy in the basin.
- The reserved flourThe recipe has you take two tablespoons out before the baking powder is mixed into the rest, and keep the board and rolling-pin floured with it. Whether the intent was to avoid working extra leavening unevenly into the surface or simply to have plain flour to hand, the instruction is explicit: use it for the board and pin only.
- One fold, not manyA single roll, fold in three, and roll again is all this needs. It is not puff pastry, and repeated turns will overwork the gluten in a dough this stiff.
- Boiled or steamedThe recipe gives no basin, covering or timing; the title is the only clue. By standard practice for this quantity of paste: line a greased 1 1/2 to 2 quart pudding basin with about two-thirds of it, fill, cap with the rest, and cover tightly with pleated parchment and foil, or a floured cloth tied under the rim. Set the basin in water reaching halfway up and steam, topping up as it drops; a fruit pudding of this size will want somewhere around 2 hours.
- YieldEnough to line and cap one large basin, or two small ones. It also works as a top crust for a fruit or vegetable pie, as the recipe says, though no oven heat is given.
- Keeping itThe napkin and cool place mean the pantry of a house without refrigeration. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate instead, and use within two or three days — the baking powder loses lift once wetted.
Boiled and steamed puddings were the backbone of British and American home cookery well into the twentieth century, and the standard casing was suet crust: shredded beef kidney fat rubbed into flour, which sets firm under long moist heat. A recipe that does without suet has to find a substitute, and butter is the obvious one, though it behaves differently — it melts sooner and gives a shorter, more crumbly wall, which is why the recipe insists so firmly on a stiff dough and cold handling. The chemical leavening is a later touch; earlier suet pastes relied on nothing but the steam trapped in the flour.