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Mace (Cup milk cups flour teaspoon)
1 cup milk 3 cups flour 1 teaspoon soda 1½ teaspoons salt Mix same as Suet Pudding.
This entry is a fragment: an ingredient list and a cross-reference. It only works if you already have the Suet Pudding recipe it points back to, and even then the list here is clearly incomplete.
- What is missingThere is no fat, no sweetener and no spice listed here, yet the heading names mace. Treat this as an incomplete variation that depends on a parent Suet Pudding recipe not reproduced on this page, rather than as a standalone recipe; what that parent contained is not shown.
- The soda needs an acidOne teaspoon of soda with plain sweet milk has little to react with and can leave a soapy, alkaline taste. Puddings of this type usually took their acid from molasses, or from sour milk or buttermilk; since the parent recipe is not given here, what supplied it cannot be confirmed.
- Mace itselfMace is the lacy aril that grows around the nutmeg seed, sold ground or as whole "blades." Its flavour is close to nutmeg but distinct, and ground mace loses its perfume fast, so buy small quantities. The recipe as printed gives no quantity.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard kidney fat, and it is what gives these puddings their texture. Butchers will usually supply it on request; shredded packaged suet is sold in some shops. Chilled and chopped fine, or grated, it distributes properly through the flour.
- "Mix same as" means steamCooking method -- "Mix same as" refers only to the mixing; no cooking method or time is stated here. Puddings of this type were generally steamed or boiled rather than baked, in a buttered mould or covered tin set over simmering water in a covered pot, with two to three hours usual for a mixture of this size.
- Flour measureCups of flour scooped and levelled by older practice run lighter than a modern packed cup, so three cups may be nearer 12 to 13 oz than 15. If the mixture will not drop from the spoon, hold back some flour rather than thinning with extra milk.
- Yield and servingNo yield or sauce is given in the recipe. Puddings of this period were commonly turned out hot and served with a hard or foamy sauce, and leftovers slice and re-steam well.
Steamed suet puddings descend from the English boiled pudding, which travelled to New England early and persisted there after it had begun to fade at home. Cookbooks of the period often give one master suet pudding followed by a run of short variants changing little more than the spice or the fruit, on the assumption that the cook has just read the parent recipe. Mace was a familiar part of the American spice shelf in the nineteenth century and turns up in puddings, pound cakes and oyster dishes. The reliance on suet also reflects a household economy in which beef fat was a by-product of butchering rather than something to be bought specially, and steaming on the back of the range cost little fuel compared with heating an oven.