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English Carrot Pudding
One pound grated carrots, three-fourths pound chopped suet, half pound each raisins and currants, four table-spoons sugar, eight table-spoons flour, and spices to suit the taste. Boil four hours, place in the oven for twenty minutes, and serve with wine sauce. - Mrs. E. A. W., Washington, D. C.
A boiled suet pudding of the English Christmas type, with grated carrot standing in for some of the fruit and fat. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to set up a pudding basin or cloth, so most of the work is filling in what is left unsaid.
- The hinge: keep the water boiling and topped upA steamed suet pudding needs four hours of unbroken gentle boil, with the water kept at least halfway up the basin. If it drops off the boil or runs dry the centre is liable to stay dense and undercooked.
- How to actually boil itButter a 2-quart pudding basin (the mixture runs to some three pounds), fill it about three-quarters, cover with buttered parchment and foil pleated across the middle, and tie it down. Stand it on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan of simmering water, lid on. A pudding cloth, which Mrs. E. A. W. may well have used, works but wants tighter tying and a floured surface.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, is what is meant. Ask a butcher for it, or use packaged shredded suet; either wants grating or chopping fine while very cold. Three-quarters of a pound is a generous amount by modern taste and can be cut back toward half a pound without the pudding collapsing.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. They are small dried grapes and sit in the supermarket beside the raisins.
- "Spices to suit the taste"For this quantity, roughly 1 to 2 teaspoons total: cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, allspice, a little clove. Ginger is period-appropriate too. Add a good pinch of salt, which the original omits.
- The twenty minutes in the ovenPresumably this dries the outside and firms the pudding. The recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, uncovered, will serve. It is optional if you would rather serve it straight from the basin.
- Wine sauceA hard sauce or a cooked sauce of butter, sugar and sherry or madeira, both of which appear elsewhere in the sauce chapters of books like this one. A brandy butter serves the same purpose.
- YieldAbout 3 pounds of pudding, serving eight to ten in small wedges. It reheats well by steaming for 30 to 45 minutes, and will keep several days refrigerated.
Carrot puddings belong to a long English line of sweet root-vegetable puddings that runs back well before the nineteenth century, when carrots were valued in baking for the sugar and moisture they carry — a useful economy when refined sugar and dried fruit were expensive. The construction here is the standard boiled suet pudding: grated fat, flour, dried fruit and spice, tied in a basin or cloth and simmered for hours over the fire, the same method behind the Christmas plum pudding. That The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from contributed receipts, prints it as "English" and credits a Washington correspondent is characteristic of these community collections: recipes traveled by letter between households, carrying their national labels with them.