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Bread and Suet Dumplings
957. Take half a pound of grated bread, half a pound of suet cut small, the juice and grated rind of a lemon, a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, and two eggs. Mix all together, and make it into five dumplings; boil them in cloths half an hour, and serve with sweet sauce in the dish.
Another. Take equal quantities of bread and suet, a little salt (some nutmeg or other spice), and a table-spoonful of white wine. Mix all well together, and roll them up; when the water boils throw them in, and let them boil for half an hour. Flour the hands well whilst rolling them. This quantity is for a penny loaf.
Two versions of the same boiled pudding: one sweet and lemon-scented, one plain and spiced. The hinge in both is the suet, which must stay in distinct cold flecks until it hits the water, so mix quickly and keep everything cool.
- Grated breadThis means fresh breadcrumbs grated from a stale-but-not-dry crumb, not the fine dry crumbs sold for coating. Half a pound is roughly 4 cups loosely packed.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher, or packaged shredded suet where sold; "cut small" means chopped to rice-grain size, or grate it from frozen. Vegetable suet works and gives a slightly softer crumb.
- Moist sugarAn unrefined soft sugar of the period, damp and pale brown. Light brown sugar is the closest modern match; granulated will work but the flavour is flatter.
- Boiling in clothsScald squares of cotton or unbleached muslin, wring them out, flour the inside generously, then tie each dumpling loosely so it can swell. Suspend or keep them off the pan bottom, and hold the water at a steady rolling boil the whole time — topping up with boiling water, never cold.
- Half an hourAdequate for dumplings of this size; the mixture comes to roughly 25 oz, so about 5 oz each. Test one: the centre should be evenly set with no pasty core. Larger dumplings need proportionally longer.
- Sweet sauceFor the first version, a standard sweet white sauce or a lemon-spiked custard, poured into the serving dish under the dumplings so they sit in it.
- The second version's quantity"A penny loaf" is not a fixed weight — it varied by place, date and the price of grain, and is genuinely ambiguous here. Treating it as about a pound of bread, with a pound of suet, gives a very rich dough; half that weight of suet is closer to how plain suet dumplings are usually made.
- No egg in the secondThe plain version has no egg, so roll it firmly and keep the dumplings small. Flouring the hands, as directed, keeps the mixture from sticking while it is rolled.
- YieldThe first version gives five dumplings, enough for four to five as a pudding course after a modest meal.
Suet dumplings sit at a point where British cooking often drew no firm line between savoury and sweet: the same bread-and-suet base takes lemon and sugar in one entry and salt, nutmeg and wine in the next. Boiling in a floured cloth was a common domestic method before pudding basins became widespread, and it persisted where nothing but a pot and a fire was needed. The reference to a penny loaf suggests instructions written for cooks who bought bread by the coin rather than the pound, and who used up its stale remainder rather than throwing it out.