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Poor Man's Pudding
1/2 cup chopped suet 1/2 cup seeded raisins 1/2 cup washed currants or seeded raisins 1 1/2 cups grated bread 1 cup flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 cup brown sugar 2 cups milk Mix ingredients in order given; beat well. Put into greased mold; place in covered saucepan with boiling water to reach half way up sides of mold. Steam 2 hours. Turn out carefully. Serve with butter and sugar or hard sauce.
A plain steamed suet pudding of the thrifty sort, leavened with baking powder rather than eggs or long-risen batter. Nothing here is difficult, but the steaming setup is where it succeeds or fails.
- Keep the water at a steady simmerThe pan must stay covered and the water at a bare boil for the full two hours, topped up with more boiling water as it drops. If the level falls or the pot goes off the heat, the pudding stalls and comes out dense and damp in the middle.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; ask a butcher, or buy shredded packaged suet, which needs no chopping. Half a cup chopped means roughly 2 oz. Frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh, and vegetable suet works as a substitute with a slightly softer crumb.
- Grated breadFresh breadcrumbs grated from a day-old loaf, not dry commercial crumbs, which will drink the milk and leave the pudding heavy. Figure about 3 oz for the 1 1/2 cups.
- Royal Baking PowderThis is a house recipe from a brand cookbook. Royal was a cream-of-tartar (single-acting) powder, so any modern double-acting baking powder works one-for-one; if anything the modern product gives a slightly better lift over a two-hour steam.
- The moldA 2 to 2 1/2 quart pudding basin or metal mold, greased and filled no more than two-thirds, since the batter rises; the quantities here make a good six cups of batter, so err on the large side. Cover the top with greased foil or a pleated cloth tied under the rim so condensation from the lid does not run in.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small dark grape raisin, not fresh red or black currants. The recipe already offers raisins as the alternative.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and a little vanilla, brandy or rum, chilled firm and served cold so it melts over the hot pudding. Allow about half a cup of butter to a cup of sugar.
- Turning out and yieldLet the mold stand five minutes before inverting, or the pudding tears. Serves six to eight, and it reheats well by steaming the slices for ten minutes.
"Poor man's pudding" is a name that attached itself to any number of steamed puddings built from the cheap end of the larder: suet instead of butter, breadcrumbs instead of flour, no eggs and no brandy. It is essentially a plum pudding stripped of everything expensive, and the shape of the recipe, dried fruit, suet, crumbs, steamed for hours in a covered mold, is the standard British boiled-pudding form that came to American kitchens and stayed there through the nineteenth century. The baking powder is the American addition and the reason this version appears in a manufacturer's cookbook at all: chemical leavening let a cook skip the eggs a traditional recipe would have needed for lift, which was precisely the economy the name advertises. Books like this one were published by baking powder companies to demonstrate uses for the product, so the branded ingredient is named where a general cookbook would simply have said baking powder.