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Lemon Pudding, Boiled
INGREDIENTS for large pudding.- 1/2 lb. of chopped suet, 3/4 lb. of bread-crumbs, 2 small lemons, 6 oz. of moist sugar, 1/4 lb. of flour, 2 eggs, milk. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Mix the suet, bread-crumbs, sugar and flour well together, adding the lemon-peel, which should be very finely minced, and the juice, which should be strained. When these ingredients are well mixed, moisten with the eggs and sufficient milk to make the pudding of the consistency of thick batter; put it into a well-buttered mould and boil for 3 1/2 hours; turn it out, strew sifted sugar over and serve with wine sauce, or not, at pleasure.
TIME.-3 1/2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. This pudding may also be baked, and will be found very good. It will take about 2 hours.
A plain Victorian suet pudding, boiled in a mould rather than steamed, and generous enough for a large table. Nothing here is difficult, but the vessel and a few of the ingredient names need translating.
- SuetBeef suet, chopped fine, is the fat that gives this pudding its structure and open crumb. Packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) works directly; if using a piece of raw suet, chill it hard and grate it, discarding any membrane.
- Moist sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar, closer to today's light muscovado than to plain granulated. Ordinary light brown sugar is the nearest substitute and gives the same faint molasses note.
- BreadcrumbsSoft crumbs from a day-old white loaf, not dry commercial crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and will make the pudding tight. Grate or pulse the bread and measure by weight: 3/4 lb is about 340 g. Cup measures for fresh crumbs vary too much to be reliable, so weigh if you can.
- The lemonsTake only the yellow zest and mince it very fine, as directed; any white pith turns bitter over three hours of cooking. Two small lemons yield about 2 tablespoons of zest and 4-5 tablespoons of juice.
- Consistency is the hinge"Thick batter" means it drops heavily from the spoon rather than pouring. Too stiff and the pudding stays dense in the middle; too slack and it will not hold shape when turned out. The recipe gives no quantity of milk: add it a little at a time and stop when the mixture drops heavily from the spoon.
- Boiling the mouldButter a 2-quart pudding basin or metal mould, fill it no more than three-quarters, and cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil, or a floured cloth tied under the rim. Stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan of boiling water reaching halfway up, cover, and keep at a steady low boil for 3 hours, topping up with boiling water so the pan never runs dry.
- Baked versionBeeton's note is worth taking. Bake in a buttered dish in a moderate oven; the recipe gives no temperature, so around 350F is a reasonable modern reading. Beeton allows about 2 hours, but start checking earlier: a skewer should come out clean and the top be well browned.
- Yield and sauceThe "large pudding" serves 8 to 10. The wine sauce of the period is a simple sweetened sherry or Madeira sauce thickened with butter and a little flour; custard or cream is an easy modern stand-in.
- Average costThe 1s. is Victorian retail pricing and has no bearing on what the ingredients cost now. It appears in Beeton because household accounting was part of the book's purpose.
Boiled suet puddings were the backbone of English household cookery for well over two centuries, and Beeton's book is full of them because they suited the kitchens they were written for: one pot, one fire, and a cook who could set the thing over the range in the morning and forget it. The pudding cloth and later the tin or china mould made it possible to boil a batter alongside the meat, and lemon gave a lift to an otherwise stodgy mixture of fat, bread and flour. The recipe also notes that it may be baked. Recipes of this family are often traced to the earlier tradition of pudding cloths described in seventeenth-century English receipt books, though the specific lemon version has no single documented origin.