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Suet Pudding, Sweet
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 3 or 4 persons.-lb. of suet, 2 oz. of raisins, a teacupful of milk, the same of golden syrup, flour, a teaspoonful of soda. AVERAGE COST, 5d. Chop the suet and mix it with the other ingredients, and flour enough to form a thick batter; put the mixture into a buttered basin, and boil or steam for 4 hours. TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the Victorian everyday sort: batter in a basin, lid of cloth or paper, four hours over water. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities as printed need interpreting before you start.
- The suet weight is unclearThe ingredient line has lost its fraction, giving only "lb. of suet" for a pudding serving three or four. A quarter pound is a plausible reading for a pudding of this size, but the original figure cannot be recovered from the text as it stands.
- Flour is unmeasured on purposeYou are told only to add "flour enough to form a thick batter" — meaning a mixture that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours. Start with 6 oz and add by tablespoons; too much flour gives a dense, dry pudding, too little and it will not hold its shape.
- SuetShredded beef suet, fresh or the packaged shredded kind, is what is meant. Vegetable suet works and behaves much the same. If using fresh suet from a butcher, pull away the membrane before chopping it fine or grating it from frozen.
- Soda and syrup work togetherThe teaspoonful of soda (bicarbonate of soda, not baking powder) is there to react with the acidity of the golden syrup and the milk. Mix and get the pudding into the basin promptly, as some of the lift is lost if the batter is left to stand.
- Golden syrupA teacupful is usually reckoned at 5 to 6 fl oz, which for syrup is roughly 7 to 8 oz by weight. Golden syrup remains widely sold; light corn syrup is the nearest substitute but is less caramelised, so the pudding will taste blander. Treacle or molasses will darken it considerably.
- A teacupfulVictorian teacups were not standardised; a teacupful is generally reckoned at somewhere between a gill (5 fl oz) and 6 fl oz, smaller than a breakfast cup. The milk and the syrup are equal measures, so any single vessel used twice will keep the proportion right.
- Covering the basinButter the basin well, fill it no more than two-thirds, and cover with pleated greaseproof paper and foil tied under the rim, or a floured cloth. Without a cover, steam condenses into the pudding and the top turns to paste.
- The water level is the whole jobSteam or boil with the water halfway up the basin, on a trivet or folded cloth, lid on, at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it drops; if the pan runs dry the basin cracks and the pudding scorches. Four hours is genuine for a pudding of this size, and 2 to 2½ hours suffices for a smaller basin.
- ServingTurn out onto a warmed dish and serve at once with custard, cream or more warmed golden syrup. It reheats well by steaming for 30 to 40 minutes.
Boiled suet puddings were the backbone of English domestic cooking for two centuries because they asked so little: no oven, one pot, and a fat that came free with the joint. Beeton's costing of fivepence marks this as a cheap sweet for a modest household, and the reliance on golden syrup dates it — Abram Lyle's refinery began selling the tinned syrup in the 1880s, and by the turn of the century it had largely displaced treacle as the everyday sweetener in English puddings. The pairing of syrup with a teaspoonful of soda belongs to the same period, when bicarbonate offered cooks a quicker rise than yeast or long-beaten eggs. "Seasonable at any time" is doing real work in the entry: unlike fruit puddings tied to an orchard, this one needed only the store cupboard, and so it turned up on Victorian tables all year.