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Suet Pudding
3 cups sifted flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon soda
1 cup suet
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup sour milk
1 teaspoon cloves
1 cup molasses
½ teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 cup raisins
Mix and sift the dry ingredients, keeping one-half cup of flour to sift over the raisins. Chop the suet fine and add it to the milk and molasses. Combine the two mixtures and add the raisins which have been dredged with flour. Grease pudding molds or baking-powder cans and fill two-thirds full of the mixture. Cover and steam for three hours. Serve with hard sauce or any desired liquid sauce.
A plain steamed pudding of the old school: molasses, spice, suet and sour milk, leavened by the reaction of soda with the acid in the milk. Nothing here is difficult, but two ingredients and one piece of equipment need translating.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; ask a butcher, as supermarket cases rarely carry it. Chop or grate it very fine while cold, or use packaged shredded suet. Frozen suet grates most easily; softened suet smears.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which pasteurised milk will not reliably imitate. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or stir 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar into 1 cup whole milk and let it stand ten minutes — the acid is what activates the soda.
- SodaOne teaspoon of soda is baking soda (older books call it saleratus). Combine wet and dry at the last moment and get the pudding into the mold promptly, since the lift begins as soon as the acid meets the soda.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate the spice. Sorghum syrup works if you have it.
- Baking-powder cansPeriod baking-powder cans were lidded tins, and came in various sizes. Today use a 1-quart pudding basin, a well-buttered coffee tin, or 2-cup ramekins; cover with buttered parchment and foil tied down with string. The two-thirds fill is not optional — the pudding rises a good deal.
- SteamingSet the covered molds on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to halfway up their sides, cover the pot, and hold the water at a bare simmer. Check every 45 minutes and top up with boiling water; a pot that boils dry scorches the pudding, and cold water added mid-steam stalls the rise. The recipe gives three hours; the batter fills several small cans rather than one mold, and smaller cans may be done sooner — test with a skewer.
- Hard sauceButter beaten with powdered sugar and a little vanilla, brandy or sherry, chilled firm. It is meant to melt into the hot pudding, so serve the pudding straight from the steamer.
- Yield and keepingThe batter comes to well over a quart, enough to fill several small cans; count on generous servings for eight or more in total. Steamed puddings keep several days wrapped and refrigerated and reheat well by steaming 20 to 30 minutes — arguably better on the second day.
Suet puddings are the direct descendants of the English boiled pudding, which moved from a cloth-tied bag to metal molds over the nineteenth century as tinware became cheap. The molasses-and-spice version was thoroughly American by the time it was being collected in household recipe books: molasses is often said to have been a common everyday sweetener in many households into the early twentieth century, and soda paired with sour milk was the standard leavening in kitchens where fresh sweet milk was inconsistent and commercial baking powder still a purchase to be considered. The instruction to steam in baking-powder cans is a small window into the period's thrift — a tin with a tight lid was a pudding mold. Recipes of this kind are usually treated as kin to plum pudding, the dessert reserved for holidays, but a suet pudding like this one was a weekday sweet, made from a shelf and a butcher's scrap.