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Carrot Pudding
Mrs. McMaster. ✓ One and a-half cups flour, one cup sugar, one cup suet, one cup raisins, one cup currants, one cup potatoes grated, one cup carrots grated, one teaspoon soda; steam or boil three hours.
A Victorian steamed pudding of the plum-pudding family, held together with grated root vegetables instead of breadcrumbs. The method is nearly all in the steaming, so the container and the water level matter more than anything else.
- The hinge: a tightly covered mouldGrease a 2-quart pudding basin or mould (the listed quantities make roughly six cups of mixture), fill it about two-thirds full, and cover with greased parchment plus foil, tied or clipped down. Any steam that condenses into the batter turns the pudding sodden, and three hours is long enough for a loose cover to fail.
- Water levelSet the mould on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pot with boiling water halfway up its sides, lid on, at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water every 45 minutes; a pot boiled dry will scorch the pudding and crack the basin.
- SuetBeef suet, grated or shredded and chilled. Butchers still sell it, and packaged shredded suet is sold for baking; a cup is roughly 4 oz. Frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is a common substitute, though the crumb is softer.
- SodaOne teaspoon of soda is baking soda (saleratus in older books). There is no acid here beyond whatever is in the fruit, so expect a modest lift only — this is meant to be dense.
- Currants and raisinsDried Zante currants, not fresh red currants. Both fruits benefit from a brief soak in hot water or spirits and a toss in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Grated potatoesGrate raw and use at once; potato browns fast and its starch and moisture are doing the binding work. Squeezing them dry defeats the purpose.
- LiquidThe recipe lists none; the vegetables release enough as they cook. The raw mixture should be stiff and barely droppable from a spoon, not pourable.
- Yield and servingServes 8 to 10. Rest 10 minutes before turning out, and serve hot with hard sauce, brandy butter or a thin sweet custard. It keeps a week wrapped and refrigerated, and re-steams for 30 to 40 minutes.
Carrot pudding belongs to the long English tradition of boiled and steamed puddings, in which grated root vegetables were often used as one thrifty alternative to the more expensive breadcrumbs, eggs and brandy of a proper Christmas plum pudding. Carrots and potatoes contribute sugar, starch and moisture at once, and versions like this one contain no eggs and no added liquid at all — a formula that nonetheless eats like a festive pudding. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by named local women, and the attribution to Mrs. McMaster is typical of the book's method: a community cookbook assembled to raise funds, printing each cook's household shorthand more or less as she wrote it. That is also why the instructions stop at "steam or boil three hours."