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Sir Watkins' Pudding
936. Mix half a pound of suet chopped fine, half a pound of breadcrumbs, a quarter of a pound of orange marmalade, a quarter of a pound of sugar (moist), six eggs. Mix all the ingredients well, with the yolks of the eggs unbeaten; take the whites, and whisk them to a stiff froth; mix altogether. Clear it, and let it stand one hour; butter a mould, steam it two hours. Serve it with marmalade, or the syrup from preserved oranges, or with wine sauce.
A plain Victorian steamed suet pudding lifted by marmalade and whisked whites. Nothing here is difficult, but the texture depends entirely on keeping the steam gentle and the water topped up.
- The hinge: fold, then steam steadilyThe whisked whites are the only lift in the pudding, so fold them in with a light hand rather than beating everything smooth. Keep the water at a bare simmer for the full two hours and top it up with boiling water; a hard boil or a dry pan gives a heavy, seized pudding.
- SuetHalf a pound is about 225 g. Packaged shredded beef suet works as written; if you buy fresh suet from a butcher, chill it hard and chop or grate it fine, discarding membrane. Vegetarian shredded suet substitutes weight for weight with a slightly softer crumb.
- BreadcrumbsVictorian recipes of this kind generally mean fine crumbs grated from stale white bread, likely finer and drier than the coarse fresh crumbs sold today. Half a pound is roughly 225 g, which is a lot of crumb by volume; measure by weight, not by cup.
- Moist sugarNineteenth-century "moist" sugar was unrefined or partly refined and slightly damp. Light brown soft sugar is the closest modern match, 115 g.
- EggsVictorian eggs are generally reckoned smaller than modern large ones, so five large eggs may sit closer to the original proportion; with six the mixture will be looser.
- Mould and preparationA 1.5-litre pudding basin, well buttered, suits this quantity. Cover the top with pleated baking parchment and foil, or a floured cloth tied under the rim, so condensation cannot drip in. The hour's rest before steaming lets the crumbs swell and is worth keeping.
- Testing and turning outThe pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back. Let it settle five to ten minutes in the basin before turning out, or the sides may slump.
- Yield and sauceServes six to eight. Warmed marmalade thinned with a spoonful of water is the simplest finish; wine sauces of the period were usually a sweetened wine such as sherry or Madeira, often thickened lightly with butter and a little flour or egg yolk, served hot.
Suet puddings named for a gentleman were a common convention in nineteenth-century British cookery books, the recipe often travelling under the name of the household or host from whose kitchen it was copied. The name here is usually taken to refer to the Williams-Wynn baronets of Wynnstay in Denbighshire, several of whom were named Sir Watkin, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and puddings under this title recur in later Victorian and Edwardian collections. What marks it out from plainer suet puddings is the marmalade: commercial marmalade from Scottish and English makers became increasingly available over the course of the century, and cooks used it as both sweetener and flavouring in steamed puddings, in place of the dried fruit and candied peel of earlier recipes. Keeping the yolks unbeaten and whisking the whites separately was one common Victorian method for lightening a heavy crumb-and-suet mixture.