Suet Pudding, Veal
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 4 or 5 persons. lb. of veal suet, lb. of bread-crumbs, lb. of currants, 3 eggs, 1/4 lb. of sugar, 1 quart of milk. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 5d.
Put the suet, finely chopped, into a saucepan with the milk to get hot, but not to boil; then pour it over the bread-crumbs; add the sugar, and the currants, washed and dried, and, lastly, the eggs well beaten.
Mix all together, put in a buttered pie-dish and bake 1 hour.
TIME.-1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A baked bread-and-suet custard rather than a boiled pudding, and the sort of dish that turns entirely on oven temperature. Note that the original text has lost several of its fractions, so the quantities need reading with care.
- The missing fractionsThe transcription reads "lb. of veal suet, lb. of bread-crumbs, lb. of currants" where the printed original carried fractions that have dropped out. Something in the region of 4 oz suet, 6 oz breadcrumbs and 4 oz currants against a quart of milk gives a workable pudding; treat those as a reconstruction, not the author's figures.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because ranges had none. Bake at 325-350F. Any hotter and the egg-and-milk mixture will curdle and weep before the hour is up.
- A quart of milkAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, a shade under five US cups, against the four cups of a US quart. Using a US quart gives a noticeably firmer, denser pudding.
- Veal suetVeal suet was the fat around the kidneys of a milk-fed calf, prized for being mild and pale. It is not sold now. Beef suet, fresh from a butcher or shredded in a packet, is the substitute; it tastes stronger, so the currants and sugar carry more of the load.
- Do not let the milk boilThe instruction is explicit and it matters. The milk is only warmed to melt and disperse the suet; boiled milk poured onto crumbs and then met with beaten egg will scramble the egg in streaks.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, a small black raisin, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Washing and drying them was to remove grit and stem fragments from bulk stock; modern packets need only a brief soak in hot water to plump.
- BreadcrumbsUse stale, dry crumbs from a plain white loaf. Fresh soft crumbs or commercial dried crumbs absorb quite differently and the pudding will either sit heavy or refuse to set.
- Testing and yieldServes four to five as printed. It is done when the centre is just set with a slight tremble; a knife inserted an inch from the middle should come out clean. Rest 15 minutes before serving, warm rather than hot.
Suet puddings of this kind sit at the hinge between two older English traditions: the boiled pudding in a cloth and the baked bread-and-milk custard. This version is essentially a bread pudding enriched with chopped raw fat, which melts during baking and lubricates the crumb in place of butter or cream. Suet was cheap and kept well in a cool larder, which goes some way to explaining its ubiquity in Victorian household cookery; the average cost of 1s 5d, recorded here as costs are recorded throughout the book, marks this out as an economical family dish. The specification of veal suet is the interesting detail, and may point to an aspirational kitchen rather than a frugal one: calf fat was whiter and milder than beef, and was sometimes preferred where a delicate flavour was wanted. Its disappearance from butchers' counters followed the long decline of the British veal trade in the twentieth century. "Seasonable at any time" carried weight in a book organised around what could be got in which month, since every ingredient here was a store-cupboard or dairy item available year round.