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Suet Puff Paste
This is excellent for boiled fruit puddings and dumplings or for baked or boiled meat pies. All the ingredients must be very cold when mixing. Take two cups of flour; one-half teaspoon of salt; one teaspoon of baking powder; one cup of suet freed from skin, chopped very fine and dredged with flour, and one cup of water. Sift the baking powder with the flour into a bowl, add the salt, suet and water and mix into a smooth, firm dough.
A plain English suet crust, given here in American cups. It is forgiving, but two things decide whether it comes out light or leaden: the temperature of the fat and how much water you actually put in.
- Keep everything coldThe recipe says it and means it. The suet must stay in distinct solid flecks through mixing; if it smears into the flour the paste steams flat instead of rising. Chill the bowl, the flour and the water, and handle the dough as little as possible.
- The water is generousA full cup of water to two cups of flour gives a very slack dough by modern standards. Add it in stages and stop when the mass just holds together as a firm, slightly tacky ball, which may come well short of the full cup, since flours vary in how much water they take up.
- Suet, and what to use insteadBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers on request and generally frozen. Peel away the papery membrane, then grate or chop it while half-frozen and toss with flour to keep the pieces separate. Packaged shredded beef or vegetable suet can be substituted cup for cup and needs no preparation.
- A cup of suet by weightFinely chopped suet packs loosely; a cup runs roughly 4 to 5 oz. That is about half the weight of the flour, which is the standard proportion for a suet crust.
- Boiling and steamingFor a pudding basin, this is cooked by long moist heat rather than fast baking. Line and cover the basin, tie down with pleated paper and foil or a floured cloth, and steam or boil for 2 to 3 hours depending on size, topping up the water so the pan never runs dry. Dumplings dropped into liquid need only a fraction of that time.
- If you bake itThe recipe gives no oven guidance. On a modern range, something like 400F for the first 20 minutes to set and colour the crust, then down to 350F to finish the filling, works. Suet paste browns more slowly than butter pastry and stays paler.
- YieldTwo cups of flour makes enough to line and lid a small pudding basin, cover a 9-inch pie dish, or roll into eight to ten dumplings.
Suet crust is often said to be the older of the two English pastries — cheaper than butter, sturdy enough to survive hours in a cloth in a pot of boiling water, and the reason so much of the British pudding tradition, sweet and savoury alike, is boiled rather than baked. It appears in an American book like the Butterick volume because that tradition travelled intact with English cooking and stayed useful in kitchens where beef fat came free with the joint and oven heat did not. Domestic ovens of the period are generally reckoned to have been unreliable and expensive to bring up to temperature; a pot on the range top was neither. Note also the baking powder, which a strictly traditional suet paste omits — an addition usually traced to the period once chemical leavening became a reliable pantry staple, meant to insure against a heavy crust.