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Suet Pudding
3 cups sifted flour 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon cloves 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup suet 1 cup sour milk 1 cup molasses 1 cup raisins Mix and sift the dry ingredients, keeping one-half cup of flour to sift over the raisins. Chop the suet fine and add it to the milk and molasses. Combine the two mixtures and add the raisins which have been dredged with flour. Grease pudding molds or baking-powder cans and fill two-thirds full of the mixture. Cover and steam for three hours. Serve with hard sauce or any desired liquid sauce.
A plain steamed molasses pudding of the sort that once stood in for Christmas pudding in households that could not spare candied fruit and brandy. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the ingredients and one of the vessels need translating.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; a butcher will still supply it, and shredded packaged suet (beef or vegetarian) works directly. A cup chopped fine is roughly 5 oz. Grate it while cold, or freeze it briefly and pulse it in a processor with a spoonful of the flour so it does not clump.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, mildly acidic. Use buttermilk cup for cup. Failing that, stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or cider vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes; the acid is what the soda reacts with.
- Soda, not baking powderOne teaspoon of soda is the entire leavening, and it draws its acid from both the sour milk and the molasses. Substituting sweet milk removes part of that acid; the molasses will still react with some of the soda, but the pudding is likely to be denser and may carry a faint soapy note, so switch to baking powder if you use sweet milk.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate the spices. Grease the measuring cup first and the cup will empty cleanly.
- Baking-powder cansPeriod cans were plain tinplate. Do not steam in modern food cans, whose interior linings are not meant for prolonged wet heat. Use a 1 1/2 to 2 quart pudding basin, a buttered metal mold with a lid, or several buttered 1 lb coffee tins if you have them, filled two-thirds as directed and covered with pleated foil tied down with string.
- SteamingSet the covered mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full three hours, topping up with boiling water as it evaporates. The mold must never sit directly on the pot floor and must never boil dry. A skewer through the center should come out clean.
- Dredging the raisinsThe half cup of flour held back and tossed with the raisins keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom during the long steam. Remember it is part of the three cups, not extra.
- Yield and keepingAbout eight to ten servings from a single large mold. It keeps a week wrapped and refrigerated and freezes well; re-steam thirty to forty minutes to serve. Hard sauce is butter beaten with powdered sugar and a little vanilla or brandy, added at the table so it melts over the hot pudding.
Steamed suet puddings came to American kitchens straight from the English boiled-pudding tradition, where a cloth-tied batter simmering over the fire needed no oven at all -- an advantage in a house with one hearth. By the time this recipe was printed, the oven existed but the technique persisted for its texture: the slow moist heat sets the flour and melts the suet gradually, giving a crumb that is dense and damp rather than cakey. Molasses and raisins were the cheap sweetening and cheap fruit of the American pantry, and the direction to use baking-powder cans as molds is a small snapshot of household thrift, tin containers being saved and reused rather than discarded. Puddings of this kind were generally the everyday cousin of the fruit-heavy holiday pudding, made through the winter and often served with hard sauce, a butter-and-sugar cream that dates back well into the nineteenth century.