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Date Pudding
1 pound dates
1 egg
½ pound beef suet
½ cup milk
3 cups bread-crums
4 tablespoons flour
¾ cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking-powder
Chop the dates and suet very fine. Mix the suet with the breadcrums. Add the dates and the sugar. Stir in the egg, add milk, and flour in which has been sifted the baking-powder. Put in a greased mold and steam for three hours. Serve with any desired sauce.
A plain steamed suet pudding of the English type, sweetened entirely by dates. The method is sound as written; the main adjustments are sourcing suet and knowing what a steaming mold wants.
- SuetHalf a pound of beef suet means the hard fat from around the kidneys, bought from a butcher and chopped or grated cold. Packaged shredded suet works directly; frozen butter grated on a box grater is the usual substitute, though the crumb will be softer and less springy.
- DatesA pound of dates is roughly 2½ cups once pitted and chopped. Period dates were drier and firmer than today's soft Medjools; if using Medjool, chop them with a little of the flour to keep the pieces from clumping into a paste.
- Bread-crumbsSoft crumbs from stale bread, not dry commercial crumbs, which will drink the milk and give a dense, sandy pudding. Three cups of soft crumbs is about 5-6 oz of bread torn or grated.
- The moldGrease a 2½ to 3-quart pudding basin or metal mold (the mixture makes upwards of two quarts) and fill it no more than two-thirds; the baking powder gives real lift. Cover tightly with greased foil or a pleated cloth tied under the rim, or the condensing steam will waterlog the top.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer. Three hours is correct for a pudding this size; check the water level hourly and top up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- DonenessA skewer into the center should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out or it will slump.
- Sauce and yield"Any desired sauce" for a pudding of this type would usually mean hard sauce, a thin vanilla or lemon custard, or a brandy sauce. The pudding serves eight to ten, and it reheats well by re-steaming for 30-45 minutes.
Steamed suet puddings were the everyday sweet of British and Anglo-American households, cheap in fuel because they cooked over the same fire that did everything else, and forgiving of a cook's attention for the three hours they sat in the pot. What dates this particular version to the turn of the twentieth century is the fruit: imported dates, largely from North Africa and the Persian Gulf, became reliably and cheaply available in American groceries in the late 1800s, and cookbooks of the period put them into everything from breads to fudge. The Butterick books were published by a pattern company aimed at the middle-class housewife, so the recipe assumes a household with a mold, a steamer and a butcher who would sell suet by the half-pound.