Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Paradise Pudding
Paradise Pudding
One pint bread crumbs, one pint suet, four eggs, four apples minced fine, one cup currants, half-cup raisins, one cup milk, spice to taste; thicken with flour, one and a half cups sugar; put in a mould and steam or boil three and a half hours.
A steamed suet pudding in the English Christmas mould, lightened with apple. The measurements are by volume throughout, and the flour is left to the cook's judgement — which is the one place this recipe can go wrong.
- "Thicken with flour"This is the hinge. The batter should be a thick, dropping consistency that holds its shape on the spoon — start with about 1 cup of flour and add more only if the mixture is loose. Too much flour gives a dense, dry pudding; too little and it will not set in the centre even after three hours.
- SuetOne pint of suet means beef kidney fat, chopped or grated fine, not rendered and not melted — roughly 8 oz by weight. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, works directly. Frozen butter grated on a box grater can stand in, though the crumb comes out softer.
- Bread crumbsSoft fresh crumbs from a stale white loaf, not the dry sandy kind sold for coating. A pint is about 4 oz. Dried crumbs will absorb the milk and eggs greedily and make the pudding tight.
- The mouldA pudding basin or covered mould of at least 3 quarts (or two smaller moulds), well buttered and filled no more than three-quarters, since the pudding rises. Cover with buttered parchment and foil tied down, or clamp the lid, so no steam gets into the batter.
- Steaming or boilingFor steaming, set the mould on a trivet in a deep pot with water reaching halfway up the sides, lid on, at a bare simmer. For boiling, the mould is fully submerged. Either way, top up with boiling water as it evaporates — if the pot runs dry the pudding scorches and the seal breaks.
- Time and donenessThree and a half hours is right for a pudding this size and not an exaggeration; suet needs long moist heat. A skewer to the centre should come out clean, and the top will feel springy rather than wet.
- Spice"Spice to taste" in a nineteenth-century American kitchen meant cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, cloves or a mix. A teaspoon of cinnamon with half a teaspoon each of nutmeg and cloves suits the quantity.
- Yield and servingServes 8 to 10. Turn out hot and serve with hard sauce, a brandy or vanilla custard, or simply cream. Leftover slices reheat well steamed or fried in butter.
"Paradise pudding" was a stock name in nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks for a boiled or steamed suet pudding in which apple stands in for some of the dried fruit — a lighter, cheaper cousin of the plum pudding, made from things a household had all winter: bread going stale, fat from the butcher, stored apples, currants and raisins from the grocer's box. The name appears to be decorative rather than descriptive, though it is often linked to the apple's place in the Eden story. Its presence in The Home Cook Book, compiled from recipes contributed by Chicago women for charity, shows how firmly the English steamed pudding had settled into Midwestern American cooking: no pastry, no oven, just a covered mould and a pot kept simmering most of an afternoon on a range that was already lit.