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Marmalade Puddings
Mrs. J. H. Mead.
Half pound suet, half pound grated bread crumbs, half pound sugar, three ounces orange marmalade; mix these ingredients together with four eggs; boil four hours. Lay a few raisins open in the bottom of the mould.
Sauce; Two ounces butter, and two ounces white sugar; beat to a cream and flavour with brandy or lemon.
A plain English suet pudding of the boiled sort, enriched with marmalade and served with a brandy hard sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the method assumes knowledge the recipe does not spell out.
- The hinge: it is steamed, not boiled"Boil four hours" — moulded puddings of this period were cooked either fully immersed in boiling water or, as is easier and now usual, standing in a covered pot with water partway up the sides at a bare simmer. Either way the mould must be tightly covered so no water gets in, and the pot topped up from a boiling kettle so it never runs dry or goes off the simmer.
- WeightsHalf a pound is 8 oz / 225 g each of suet, crumbs and sugar; three ounces of marmalade is a scant third of a cup. The proportions are by weight throughout, so a scale gives far better results than cups, particularly for the breadcrumbs.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded and often frozen at good butchers or as packaged shredded suet. It melts at a higher temperature than butter, which is what gives the pudding its open, light crumb; frozen grated butter is the usual stand-in but produces a denser result.
- BreadcrumbsGrated crumbs from stale, close-textured white bread, not dried packaged crumbs, which are far more absorbent and will make the pudding heavy and dry.
- The mouldA 1.5 to 2 quart pudding basin or mould, well buttered, filled no more than three-quarters full. Cover with buttered parchment pleated down the centre and tie it on, or use a lidded mould; the pudding expands and needs headroom and a barrier against condensation.
- "Lay a few raisins open"Split the raisins and press them cut side down against the buttered mould so they pattern the top when the pudding is turned out.
- Testing and unmouldingFour hours is right for a full-sized mould; a skewer should come out clean and the pudding pull slightly from the sides. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out, or it may collapse.
- The sauceThis is hard sauce, not a cooked one: two ounces each butter and sugar creamed together with a spoonful of brandy or lemon juice and zest, then chilled. Use icing or superfine sugar unless you want it gritty, and taste for balance, as the ratio here is quite lean on flavouring.
- YieldServes six to eight. It reheats well, steamed for 45 minutes, and keeps several days wrapped and refrigerated.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is generally cited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook of its kind — hence the contributor's name attached to each receipt, as here with Mrs. J. H. Mead. The dish itself is thoroughly British: the boiled suet pudding was the backbone of English domestic cookery, and by the 1870s Scottish marmalade, made commercially in Dundee since the previous century, had become cheap and common enough to be treated as a flavouring rather than a luxury preserve. Brandy butter, or hard sauce, was the standard accompaniment to any pudding of this family, and the same combination — suet, crumbs, sugar, eggs, a preserve, a spirit-flavoured butter — underlies Christmas pudding and half a dozen other Victorian steamed puddings that have since fallen out of everyday use, largely because few kitchens now keep a pot simmering for four hours.