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Plain Boiled Suet Pudding
2 pounds of flour. 1 pound of suet. 1 1/2 pints of water. A large teaspoonful of salt.
Chop the suet, not too fine, and rub it into the flour. Mix with the water. It makes a soft dough. Beat it thoroughly with a spoon. Put it in a conical or funnel-shaped pudding bag, previously wetted and floured, and boil about three hours. The water should be boiling when the pudding is put in and not allowed to stop. The suet makes the pudding quite light and rich. Eat with butter and syrup.
A plain suet dough boiled in a cloth bag — the simplest form of the English boiled pudding, and the one most dependent on technique rather than ingredients. Two things decide whether it works: a properly prepared cloth and water that never stops boiling.
- The hinge: keep the water at a rolling boilIf the pot drops off the boil, the dough absorbs water instead of setting and the pudding turns sodden and grey at the edges. Keep a kettle of boiling water alongside and top up with boiling water only, never cold.
- Quantities in modern terms2 pounds of flour is roughly 7 to 7 1/2 cups; 1 1/2 pints is 3 cups of water. This is a large pudding — the recipe gives no yield, but it would serve eight or more as a substantial dessert — and it halves cleanly.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and often available frozen. Shredded packaged suet (the boxed British kind) works and is already floured. Chop it coarsely, as directed: pea-sized pieces melt during the long boil and leave the crumb open, while finely minced suet makes the pudding dense.
- The pudding bagA square of unbleached cotton or linen, scalded, wrung out and dusted generously with flour on the inside. Gather it into the conical shape described and tie the neck with string, leaving room for the dough to swell by about a third. Modern practice more often uses a greased pudding basin with a pleated foil and parchment lid, steamed rather than submerged — the timing is similar.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder, egg or sugar here. The lightness comes entirely from the suet melting and steam expanding within the dough, which is why the beating with a spoon matters — it works air in and develops just enough gluten to hold the structure.
- Three hours, and it means threeUnlike many old timings, this one is not inflated. Suet needs long, gentle cooking to render fully; undercooked suet pudding tastes tallowy. Keep the bag off the bottom of the pot with a trivet or an inverted plate so it does not scorch.
- ServingTurn it out at once — left in the cloth it steams and goes clammy. Butter and syrup is the period serving; golden syrup, maple syrup, treacle, or a jug of warm jam all suit it. Leftovers slice cold and fry well in butter.
Boiled suet puddings belong to a tradition generally traced to English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, when the pudding cloth is said to have replaced the animal gut casing and made puddings something any household could produce with a pot and a fire. The plain version here is the ancestor of the whole family - dumplings, roly-poly, spotted dog, and the savoury suet crusts that line steak-and-kidney puddings. Its appearance in a professional pastry manual is a reminder that boiled puddings seem to have remained familiar fare well into the modern era: cheap, filling, made from flour and butcher's trimmings, and cooked on the stovetop without tying up oven space. The instruction to eat it with butter and syrup places it firmly as an economy dessert, sweetened at the table rather than in the bowl.