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Thanksgiving Pudding II
1/3 cup suet. 3/4 teaspoon cinnamon. ½ lb. figs, finely chopped 2½ cups stale bread crumbs 3/4 cup milk 1 cup brown sugar 1 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon grated nutmeg ½ cup English walnut meats ½ cup raisins, seeded and cut in pieces 2 tablespoons flour 4 eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder Chop suet and work with the hand until creamy, then add figs. Soak bread crumbs in milk, add eggs well beaten, sugar, salt, and spices. Combine mixtures, add nut meats and raisins dredged with flour. Sprinkle over baking powder and beat thoroughly. Turn into a buttered.mould, steam three hours, and serve with Yellow Sauce II (see p. 407), flavored with brandy.
A steamed suet pudding of the old school, built on stale bread rather than flour. The ingredient list as printed leaves out one item the method calls for, so read both before you shop.
- The missing suetThe instructions open with "chop suet" but no quantity appears in the list. The original as printed is genuinely ambiguous on the amount; steamed puddings of this size commonly take somewhere in the region of ½ lb, but the figure is a guess, not the book's.
- Suet itselfBeef kidney suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, is a butcher's item rather than a supermarket one. Buy it in the piece, chill it hard, and chop or grate it — working it with the hand until creamy, as directed, means warming and smearing it so it distributes rather than sitting in lumps.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, so named to distinguish it from the American black walnut. Ordinary shelled walnut halves are what is wanted.
- The mouldA 2-quart pudding basin or covered tin mould, buttered and filled no more than two-thirds, so the pudding has room to rise. Cover tightly with a lid or buttered parchment tied down with string.
- SteamingSet the mould on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up, cover, and keep the water at a steady simmer for the full three hours. Top up with boiling — not cold — water as it drops, and never let the pot boil dry.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer to the center should come out clean and the pudding should pull slightly from the sides. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out. The original gives no yield; on the volume of the batter it would serve roughly ten.
- The sauceYellow Sauce II is a separate recipe on p. 407 and should be looked up rather than assumed; add the brandy off the heat, at the end, so the aroma is not driven off.
- KeepingSteamed puddings improve for a day or two. Cool, wrap, refrigerate, and re-steam 45 minutes to an hour to serve.
Steamed suet puddings came to American Thanksgiving tables by way of the English Christmas pudding, and the book gives two versions side by side — a sign of how firmly the boiled-and-steamed pudding still held its place at the end of a heavy nineteenth-century holiday dinner. The bread crumbs here are doing the work flour does in later recipes, a habit from a period when stale bread was never thrown out and puddings were among the standard ways of using it up. Figs, seeded raisins and walnuts all point to the same domestic economy: dried and shelf-stable fruit that a household could keep through the winter. Note that the raisins are "seeded and cut in pieces" — seedless varieties were not yet the default, and pitting fruit by hand was ordinary kitchen labor.