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Pudding, Aunt Nelly's
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 6 persons. lb. of flour, 1/2 lb. of treacle, 1/2 lb. of suet, the rind and juice of 1 lemon, a few strips of candied lemon-peel, 3 tablespoonfuls of cream, 2 eggs.
AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Chop the suet finely; mix it with the flour, treacle, lemon-peel, minced, and candied lemon-peel; add the cream, lemon-juice and 2 well-beaten eggs; beat the pudding SULTANA PUDDING. well, put it into a buttered basin, tie it down with a cloth, and boil from 3 to 4 hours.
TIME.-3 to 4 hours. milk, 3 oz. of ground rice, 3 oz. of butter, lb. of sugar, flavouring of lemon-peel or bay-leaf, 4 eggs, puff-paste, currants. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Infuse 2 laurel or bay-leaves, or the rind of 1/2 lemon in the milk, and when it is well flavoured, strain it and add the rice; boil these for 1/4 hour, stirring all the time then take them off the fire, pour in the butter, sugar and eggs, and let these latter be well beaten before they are added to the other ingredients; when nearly cold, line some patty-pans with puff-paste, fill with the custard, strew over each a few currants, and bake from 20 to 25 minutes in a moderate oven.
TIME.-20 to 25 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the Victorian type: no breadcrumbs, no raising agent, just flour, suet and treacle bound with egg and cream. The one thing to get right is the water — the pan must stay at a steady simmer, topped up with boiling water, for the whole three to four hours, or the pudding sinks and turns heavy.
- Flour quantityThe flour weight is given without its fraction. As printed elsewhere in Beeton, this pudding balances equal weights of flour, treacle and suet — 1/2 lb (about 225 g) of each.
- TreacleBritish black treacle, not golden syrup and not American molasses in the sulphured sense. Unsulphured blackstrap is closer to the original than light molasses, though it will read slightly more bitter.
- SuetBeef suet, chopped fine, is what is meant. Packaged shredded suet works directly; a block of raw kidney suet needs the membrane pulled away before chopping. Vegetable suet gives a lighter, less savoury crumb.
- Lemon, twice overBoth the fresh rind (minced) and separate strips of candied peel go in. The candied peel is mixed through rather than laid on as a garnish, and adds perfume against the treacle.
- Cream measureThree tablespoonfuls is about 45 ml. Any cream of 30% fat or above will do; the quantity is small and is there for richness, not liquid.
- The basin and clothButter a 2-pint (about 1.1 litre) pudding basin and leave an inch of headroom. A pleated sheet of parchment under the cloth, both tied under the rim with string, keeps water out; a lidded plastic pudding basin does the same job. Stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in the pan so it does not rattle on the base.
- Boiling timeThree to four hours is not exaggeration for a suet mixture of this density, but the water level is what matters. Keep it at least halfway up the basin and add only boiling water, or the pudding stalls.
- ServingServes six, as stated. Turn out hot and serve with a thin custard or a lemon or treacle sauce; it is dry enough to want one.
Named puddings — Aunt Nelly's, Half-pay Pudding — filled the boiled-pudding chapters of nineteenth-century English cookery books, and the names rarely point to a traceable person; they signalled a homely family recipe rather than a confectioner's one. What sets this one apart from its neighbours is that treacle does all the sweetening. Cane sugar was cheap by the 1860s but treacle was cheaper still, a by-product of refining, and a pudding built on flour, suet and treacle put a hot sweet course on the table for the shilling the book quotes. The boiled suet pudding in a cloth-tied basin was the standard English answer to a small coal range with one oven and many pots: it cooked over the same fire that was doing everything else.