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Currant Suet Roll
1 1/2 pounds of flour. 1 pound of chopped suet. 1 pound of currants or raisins. 1 pint of water. Salt.
Mix altogether. Make the dough into two long rolls, solid, tie up in cloths and boil two hours. The softer the dough can be to be, handled at all, the lighter the pudding will be.
A boiled cloth pudding of the plainest kind, and it works if you respect two things: a wet dough and water that never stops boiling. Everything else is bookkeeping.
- The hinge is a slack doughThe note at the end is the whole recipe: mix only until it just holds together and can be rolled, tacky rather than smooth. A firm, well-worked dough gives a dense, gluey roll. Flour your hands and the cloth rather than adding more flour to the mass.
- SuetThis means raw suet, chopped or grated fine — usually beef kidney suet, though mutton suet was also used — not rendered tallow and not butter. Fresh suet from a butcher grates most easily half-frozen; packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) works and is already floured. Butter or shortening will melt out too early and the crumb will be short instead of light.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh red currants. A pound is roughly 3 cups. Toss them in a spoonful of the flour so they distribute rather than sink.
- No leavening is givenPeriod "flour" here would have been plain, and this pudding rises only from steam. If you want a lighter crumb, 2 to 3 teaspoons of baking powder sifted into the flour will do it, though that is a modern departure from what is written. The salt is unquantified; about 1 1/2 teaspoons suits this weight of flour.
- The clothUse a square of unbleached cotton or a well-washed tea towel, scalded, wrung out, and dusted generously with flour. Roll the dough in the cloth loosely and tie both ends and the seam, leaving room for expansion — a tight bundle splits or comes out solid.
- BoilingLower the rolls into water already at a rolling boil and keep it there for the full two hours, topping up with boiling water from a kettle so the temperature never drops. A plate or trivet in the bottom of the pot keeps the cloth off the metal. A steamer can be substituted, but expect it to take longer than the two hours given for boiling.
- Yield and servingTwo rolls, each serving six to eight. Unwrap immediately after cooking or the outside turns sticky, and slice thickly. Traditionally served hot with hard sauce, a thin custard, or simply sugar and cream.
Boiled suet rolls of this sort are the workaday ancestors of the British spotted dick and jam roly-poly: flour, chopped suet, dried fruit and water, cooked in a floured cloth over the same fire that was already going for something else. The recipe is recorded in such shorthand that the writer plainly assumes the reader has tied up a pudding cloth before and needs only the proportions. Suet was the cheap, reliable fat of the nineteenth-century kitchen, solid at room temperature and slow to melt, so it holds its shape long enough for the flour around it to set into a light crumb. The single line of advice about keeping the dough as soft as possible is the sort of detail a cook learns by doing; it is the only thing in the recipe that cannot be worked out from the ingredient list.