Home › Recipes › With Rum Sauce
With Rum Sauce
A brown suet pudding with molasses and spices. 2 pounds of flour. 3/4 pound of chopped suet. 1 pound of molasses. 1 pound of raisins. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 1 ounce of mixed ground spices. 1 small teaspoonful of soda. 1 pint of milk. 2 eggs.
Mingle the dry articles together first, then the fluids poured in the middle, stir up. Boil 4 hours or longer. Transparent sauce with rum, brandy or wine. The next is a flaxen blonde, that will dispute for supremacy with the highest.
A large boiled suet pudding of the hotel-kitchen sort, written for a cook who already knows how to rig a pudding cloth. The quantities are given by weight, which is the easiest part to get right; the method is where it needs filling in.
- The hinge: keep the water boiling and topped upA boiled or steamed pudding must stay in gently but continuously boiling water for the full time, with the level kept up from a boiling kettle. If the pot goes off the boil or runs dry, the centre sets heavy and greasy and no extra time will fix it.
- Weights to volumes2 lb flour is roughly 7 cups; 1 lb molasses is about 1 1/3 cups; 1 lb raisins is about 3 cups. The 1 oz of mixed ground spices is about 4 tablespoons, which is assertive but correct for a batch this size. The recipe does not say which spices; a period mixture would usually run to some combination of cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg and allspice.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; ask a butcher, or buy shredded suet. Chill it hard and chop or grate it fine, then toss it through the flour so the pieces stay separate. Frozen grated butter is the usual stand-in, though it gives a denser, less open crumb.
- Soda and molassesThe "small teaspoonful of soda" is the only chemical leavening, and it works by reacting with the acid in the molasses. Mix and get the pudding into the water promptly, since much of the reaction begins as soon as the batter comes together.
- How to boil itEither fill buttered pudding basins two-thirds full and cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down, or scald and flour a pudding cloth, tie the batter in loosely to allow swelling, and lower it into the pot on a trivet or plate. Four hours suits a single large pudding; smaller basins are done in about two and a half.
- "Transparent sauce"A period term for a clear sauce thickened with cornstarch or arrowroot rather than eggs or cream — sugar, water, a little butter, thickened, then the rum, brandy or wine stirred in off the heat so the spirit is not cooked away.
- Yield and keepingThis is a trade-sized batch: about 6 lb of pudding, serving 16 to 20. It keeps well wrapped and cold for a week, improves for a day or two, and reheats by steaming for 45 minutes.
- The last sentence"The next is a flaxen blonde" refers to the recipe that follows in the book, a pale pudding set against this dark one. It is not an instruction.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of trade manuals published in Chicago in the 1880s and generally attributed to Jessup Whitehead, a hotel steward who wrote for cooks feeding dining rooms rather than families — which is why the flour is measured in pounds and the sauce gets three interchangeable spirits. The pudding itself is straight out of the English boiled-pudding tradition, where a cloth and a stockpot did the work of an oven, transplanted to American kitchens and sweetened with molasses instead of the treacle its ancestors used. Molasses was the cheap sweetener of the period, a by-product of cane refining, and its faint acidity is exactly what makes the single teaspoon of soda worth including.