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Suet Pudding
2 cups flour 1 teaspoon soda 2 cups seeded raisins 1 teaspoon each cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg 1/4 cup each citron, lemon peel, orange peel 1 cup each currants, suet chopped fine, sweet milk and molasses Mix and sift dry ingredients, stir in the fruits. Add suet to milk and molasses, combine the mixtures. Steam in greased mold for 3 hours. Serves 10.
A plain steamed molasses pudding of the type served at the end of a Christmas dinner. The method is sound as written; most of what needs saying concerns the suet, the mold and the steaming.
- SuetThis means raw beef kidney fat, not the packaged bird food sold under the same name. Ask a butcher for kidney suet and chop or grate it very fine while cold, or substitute an equal volume of frozen grated butter, which gives a slightly denser crumb.
- Sweet milkOrdinary whole milk. The term distinguished it from the sour or buttermilk that older recipes often called for, and here it matters: with soda as the only leavener and molasses supplying the acid, do not swap in buttermilk without adjusting.
- SodaBaking soda, reacting with the molasses. Mix and get the pudding into the steamer promptly rather than letting the batter stand.
- Filling the moldGrease a mold of at least 3 quarts (the batter runs to over 2 quarts as written) and fill it no more than two-thirds, then cover tightly with a lid or foil tied down. The pudding rises appreciably and steam condensing into an open mold will make it sodden.
- The steamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up, cover, and hold at a bare simmer. Check the water level hourly and top up with boiling water; the three hours is a genuine requirement.
- Candied peelCitron is scarce now. Any mix of candied orange and lemon peel totalling about 3/4 cup will do, chopped small and tossed with a spoonful of the measured flour so it does not sink.
- Doneness and servingA skewer to the center should come out clean; let the pudding stand 10 minutes before unmolding. Serves 10 with a hard sauce, brandy butter or plain cream, and it reheats by steaming for 30 to 45 minutes.
- Making aheadSteamed puddings of this kind improve after a day or two wrapped and refrigerated. There is no alcohol here to preserve it, so treat it as a keeper of days rather than the months claimed for boozy Christmas puddings.
Suet pudding is the thrifty American descendant of the English boiled plum pudding, which by the nineteenth century had settled into its place as the close of Christmas dinner. Where the English version leaned on breadcrumbs, brandy and a long maturing, the household books printed on this side of the Atlantic simplified it into a flour-and-molasses batter studded with raisins, currants and candied peel: cheap sweetening, cheap fat, and the fruit reserved for the holiday. Steaming rather than baking suited kitchens where oven heat was unreliable and stovetop space was not, and it produces the moist, close crumb that suet demands.