Currant Dumplings
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-1 1/4 lb. of flour, 6 oz. of suet, 1/2 lb. of currants, rather more than 1/2 pint of water. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Chop the suet finely, mix it with the flour, and add the currants, which should be nicely washed, picked and dried; mix the whole to a limp paste with the water (if wanted very nice, use milk); divide it into 7 or 8 dumplings; tie them in cloths, and boil for 1 1/4 hour. They may be boiled without a cloth: they should then be made into round balls, and dropped into boiling water, and should be moved about at first, to prevent them from sticking to the bottom of the saucepan. Serve with a cut lemon, cold butter and sifted sugar.
TIME. In a cloth, 1 hour; without, hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain boiled suet pudding dough studded with dried currants, cooked as individual dumplings. The dough should be soft, and the water must stay at a steady boil throughout.
- SuetBeef suet is the traditional fat and gives the light, open crumb; shredded packet suet (beef or vegetarian) can be used weight for weight. If starting from a block, chill it hard and chop or grate it fine so no lump larger than a pea remains.
- Currants, not red currantsThese are dried Zante currants, small black raisins, not fresh currants. "Washed, picked and dried" means rinsing off packing grit, pulling out stalks, and drying well so they do not wet the dough.
- Quantity of currantsThe printed page gives half a pound of currants, as our text now reads. That is a generous but workable proportion for a pound and a quarter of flour with six ounces of suet.
- "Limp paste"A soft, just-cohesive dough, wetter than pastry and slacker than scone dough. Rather more than half a pint of water is upwards of 10 fl oz, say 11-12; add it gradually, as flours vary in absorption.
- ClothsUse scalded cotton or muslin squares, floured on the inside so the dough does not stick, and tie loosely to allow the dumpling to swell. Modern equivalents: pleated squares of muslin, or simply drop the balls straight into the water as the recipe allows.
- TimingAn hour in a cloth is right. The uncloth ed time has dropped its number in the original text; free dumplings of this size are generally done in around 20-30 minutes, and are cooked when a skewer comes out clean and the centre is no longer pasty.
- Keep them moving at firstFree dumplings sink and will weld to the pan base before the outside sets. Stir gently for the first minute or two, then leave the water at a lively simmer rather than a rolling boil, which breaks them up.
- Yield and servingSeven or eight dumplings, serving six. The "cut lemon, cold butter and sifted sugar" is the period dressing: squeeze lemon over, drop on a knob of cold butter and dust with caster sugar at the table.
Suet dumplings, sweet and savoury, were the workhorse pudding of the nineteenth-century English kitchen: they cooked in the same pot as everything else, needed no oven, and stretched flour and a little fat into a filling course. Beeton's costing of eightpence for a dish serving six is the point of the entry as much as the method, since Household Management and the abridgements that followed it were sold to households running to a budget. Zante currants, imported dried from the Ionian islands, were cheap and keepable, which is why so many of these puddings are "seasonable at any time" while fruit puddings proper are tied to a month. The lemon-and-cold-butter service is older than the book and appears with plain boiled puddings generally, standing in for a cooked sauce.