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English Suet Pudding
2 pounds of flour. 3/4 pound of chopped suet. 1 pound of white sugar. 1 pound of either raisins or currants. 1 teaspoonful of salt. Mix the above together dry, then add 1 pint of milk. 2 eggs. A small teaspoonful of soda. Stir all thoroughly together. Boil in pudding bags 4 hours. More eggs in this pudding injures it. Can be made without any. Butter and sugar, cream sauce, or syrup, or any kind of pudding sauce suits.
A big, plain boiled pudding of the old English sort, scaled for a bakery rather than a household. Everything about it is straightforward except the bag, which is where most modern attempts fail.
- The hinge: the water must never stop simmeringA boiled pudding cooks by steady, gentle heat for the full four hours; if the pot goes off the boil or runs dry the centre sets badly and the pudding turns heavy and sodden. Keep a kettle of boiling water alongside and top up as needed, never with cold water.
- Pudding bagsA pudding bag is a square of close-woven cotton or unbleached calico, scalded, wrung out, and dusted heavily with flour before the batter goes in. Tie it loosely enough to let the pudding swell by about a quarter, and keep it off the base of the pot on a rack or an inverted plate.
- Or use a basinIf you would rather not wrestle a cloth, divide the mixture between greased pudding basins, cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down, and steam. Same four hours for a large basin; a small one-pint basin is done in about two.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, still available from a butcher and sold ready-shredded in some shops. Chop or grate it cold, tossed with a little of the flour so it does not clump. Vegetable suet works; butter does not behave the same way and gives a denser crumb.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, a small raisin, not the fresh redcurrant or blackcurrant. Either fruit should be tossed in flour before mixing so it does not sink.
- The sodaA teaspoon of soda in sweet milk has little acid to react with and will contribute not much beyond a faint soapy note if overdone. Use sour milk or buttermilk in place of the sweet milk, or use baking powder instead of the soda; either way this pudding is meant to be close-textured, not risen.
- The batter is stiffTwo pounds of flour to a pint of milk and two eggs gives a heavy dough rather than a pourable batter. That is correct for a bag pudding, but expect to work it with a spoon or your hands, and add milk only a spoonful at a time if it will not come together.
- YieldAbout six pounds of pudding, enough for twelve to sixteen. Halve it comfortably. Leftovers keep several days wrapped and are traditionally sliced and fried in butter.
- DonenessA skewer into the centre should come out clean and hot to the touch. Turn the pudding out at once; left sitting in its cloth it sweats and the surface goes slimy.
Boiled puddings tied in a cloth are one of the defining English contributions to the kitchen, the pudding cloth appearing in English recipes from the seventeenth century onward and freeing the cook from having to stuff a batter into an animal's gut. Suet — the firm kidney fat of beef — melts more slowly than butter, leaving small pockets that give a boiled pudding its particular open, moist crumb, and it kept well in an unrefrigerated larder. The instruction that "more eggs in this pudding injures it" is the voice of experience — eggs firm and tighten the crumb, and a suet pudding wants to stay soft.