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Vegetable Pudding
887. Half a pound of grated carrots, half a pound of cold mashed potatoes, half a pound of flour, half a pound of suet, half a pound of sugar, four ounces of candied lemon-peel, one quarter of a pound of currants, to be boiled slowly four hours.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the mid-Victorian sort, using carrot and cold potato in place of the usual breadcrumbs. The proportions are given by weight only, with no liquid, no egg and no spice, so the character of the finished pudding depends almost entirely on how you handle the mixing and the boil.
- The hinge: keep the water at a bare simmerA four-hour boil means four hours of gentle, unbroken simmering with the water kept topped up from a boiling kettle. If the pan boils dry or you add cold water, the pudding stops cooking and sets heavy and grey in the middle.
- Half a pound eachThe list is 8 oz (225 g) apiece of carrot, potato, flour, suet and sugar, 4 oz (115 g) candied peel and 4 oz (115 g) currants, making 3 lb of raw mixture in all.
- SuetVictorian suet was beef kidney fat bought in the lump and shredded fine with flour to stop it clumping. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, substitutes weight for weight.
- Candied lemon-peelThis then meant whole candied peel, cut up by the cook. Modern chopped mixed peel is drier and sharper; 4 oz is a good deal of it, and cutting it to 2 oz will not hurt the pudding.
- MoistureNo egg, milk or water is specified, so the wet comes from the raw grated carrot and the mashed potato alone. Grate the carrot on the fine side and mash the potato while still warm enough to be soft, or the mixture will not come together into a dropping consistency.
- Basin or clothButter a pudding basin well, fill it no more than three-quarters, and cover with pleated baking parchment and foil tied under the rim. A floured cloth also works but gives a wetter skin; either way the pudding should sit on a trivet or folded cloth rather than the bare pan bottom.
- ServingTurn out hot and serve with a sweet sauce, custard or brandy butter. It reheats well by steaming for about 45 minutes and keeps several days in the cold.
Carrot puddings were a fixture of English cookery well before this book appeared: carrots are sweet, cheap and available all winter, and grated raw they give a pudding body and moisture that would otherwise cost eggs or cream. Recipes for them run through eighteenth-century manuscript books and into the printed collections of the nineteenth, usually sitting in the same chapter as the boiled batter and suet puddings. The addition of cold mashed potato here is thrift of the same kind, a way of using yesterday's remains in something that reads as a treat rather than a leftover. The dried fruit, candied peel and long slow boil put this squarely in the family that ends at the Christmas pudding, and it is worth noting how little separates the two beyond spice, brandy and a darker sugar.