Military Pudding
1/2 lb. of suet INGREDIENTS for 6 small puddings.- lb. of suet, 1/2 lb. of bread-crumbs, 1/2 lb. of moist sugar, the rind and juice of 1 large lemon. AVERAGE CosT, 8d.
Chop the suet finely, mix it with the bread-crumbs and sugar and mince the lemon-rind and strain the juice; stir these into the other ingredients, mix well and put the mixture into small buttered cups and bake for rather more than 1/4 hour turn them out on the dish and serve with lemon-sauce. The above ingredients may be made into small balls and boiled for about 1/2 hour ; they should then be served with the same sauce as when baked.
TIME. Rather more than hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain Victorian suet pudding, sweetened and sharpened with lemon, baked in cups rather than steamed in a basin. It is essentially a sweet dumpling mixture, and it lives or dies on how finely the suet is chopped.
- Suet quantityThe amount of suet is missing in this printing. Half a pound, matching the weights given for the crumbs and sugar, is the most likely reading, though the figure cannot be recovered from the page itself; a lighter result comes from halving the suet.
- Suet itselfBeeton means raw beef kidney suet, bought in a lump and chopped by hand. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works directly and needs no chopping. Grated frozen butter is a substitute but gives a denser, greasier crumb.
- Chop it fineThis is the hinge. Hand-chopped suet must be reduced almost to a meal, with a little flour or some of the crumbs dusted over it to stop it clumping. Coarse pieces melt out and leave hollows.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar. Light muscovado is the closest match; white caster sugar will work but loses the faint molasses note.
- Bread-crumbsSoft crumbs from stale white bread, not dried or toasted crumbs. Dried crumbs absorb far more moisture and the mixture will not hold together without an egg or a spoonful of milk.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, about 350F/180C, suits; the 'rather more than a quarter of an hour' may run short for filled cups, and 25 to 30 minutes may be needed. They are done when set and lightly browned on top.
- CupsSmall buttered cups means dariole moulds or teacups, about 4 fl oz each. Butter them well and dust with sugar so they turn out cleanly. A buttered muffin tin will do the same job.
- The boiled versionFor the balls, roll walnut-sized pieces and simmer gently rather than at a rolling boil, which breaks them up. Half an hour is right.
- Yield and sauceSix small puddings, so two or three servings by modern appetites. A lemon sauce here would be a thin sweetened sauce thickened with a little flour or arrowroot and flavoured with rind and juice; custard or cream serves as well.
Suet puddings of this kind were the backbone of nineteenth-century British sweet courses, cheap in ingredients and forgiving of a cook working without a reliable oven. The name "military pudding" is not explained by Beeton and its origin is obscure; it is commonly taken to signal a plain, robust, economical pudding of the sort associated with barracks, mess kitchens and institutional catering rather than any particular regiment, but this is tradition rather than documented fact. What marks it out from the great steamed puddings is the absence of flour, eggs and dried fruit: the whole structure is suet and breadcrumbs bound by sugar and lemon, which is why it is baked in small cups or boiled as balls rather than turned out of a basin. The note "seasonable at any time" mattered in a book organised around what the market could supply; a pudding needing nothing but store-cupboard staples and one lemon was a genuinely useful thing to have.