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Date Pudding
1 pound dates 1/2 pound beef suet 3 cups bread-crums 3/4 cup sugar 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 4 tablespoons flour 2 teaspoons baking-powder Chop the dates and suet very fine. Mix the suet with the bread-crums. Add the dates and the sugar. Stir in the egg, add milk, and flour in which has been sifted the baking-powder. Put in a greased mold and steam for three hours. Serve with any desired sauce.
A plain steamed suet pudding of the old school, dense with dates and stretched with breadcrumbs. Nothing here is unsafe; the only real demands are a tight mold and three hours of steady, gentle steam.
- Keep the water simmering, never boiling hardThe hinge of any steamed pudding is constant low heat and a lid that keeps the steam in. Cover the mold with greased parchment and foil tied down with string, set it on a rack in a deep pot with water halfway up the sides, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates. If the pot boils dry the pudding scorches and stops rising.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers as fresh suet or packaged shredded. Half a pound is about 225 g. Chill it hard before chopping, or grate it on the coarse side of a box grater; it should stay in distinct flecks, not smear into a paste.
- Bread-crumsThe recipe does not say which; soft fresh crumbs from day-old white bread are the likelier intention, since dry packaged crumbs absorb more liquid and give a heavier pudding. Three cups of soft crumbs is roughly 5 to 6 oz.
- DatesA pound of dates; the recipe does not say whether that is weighed before or after pitting, so allow a little extra if yours have stones. Deglet Noor chop cleanly; Medjool are wetter and stickier, so dust the chopped pieces with a little of the measured flour to keep them from clumping in the batter.
- Mold sizeThis makes roughly 2 quarts of batter, so use a 3-quart pudding basin or mold and fill it no more than two-thirds, leaving room for the baking powder to lift it.
- Testing and unmoldingAfter three hours a skewer to the center should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy. Let it stand 10 minutes before turning out, or it may split.
- Sauce"Any desired sauce" would commonly have meant a hard sauce of butter and powdered sugar, a thin vanilla or lemon custard, or a hot cream sauce.
- Yield and keepingServes eight to ten in small portions. It reheats well: re-steam slices or the whole pudding for 30 to 45 minutes.