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Snowdon Pudding
Madame E. Pernet.
Quarter pound bread crumbs, half pound suet, quarter pound sugar, two eggs well beaten, two tablespoonsful preserves, two ounces candied citron or orange peel. Butter a mould or basin, stick some of the citron over it, pour in your mixture, and steam for three or four hours; melt some of the preserves, and pour over the pudding for sauce.
A plain steamed suet pudding of the Victorian type, with almost no liquid and no leavening beyond the beaten eggs. A few things need translating before it will work.
- WeightsQuarter pound of breadcrumbs is about 2 cups of fresh soft crumbs; half a pound of suet is roughly 2 cups shredded; quarter pound sugar is a generous half cup. Two ounces of citron peel is about a third of a cup, chopped.
- SuetBeef suet, shredded, is the fat here and it is what makes the texture. Packaged shredded suet (including vegetarian versions) works; frozen butter grated coarse is the usual substitute, though the pudding will be denser.
- "Preserves"Here this means jam or marmalade. Snowdon pudding is traditionally made with lemon marmalade, which cuts the suet; raspberry or blackcurrant also work. Avoid soft modern jelly, which vanishes into the crumbs.
- The mouldA "basin" is a pudding basin — any heatproof bowl of about 1.5 imperial pints/850 ml, buttered heavily, with the citron pressed onto the butter so it stays in place as a pattern. Cover with pleated parchment and foil and tie it down, or the steam will condense into the pudding.
- SteamingSet the covered basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan, add boiling water to halfway up the side, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it drops; if the pan boils dry the basin cracks and the pudding scorches.
- TimeThree to four hours is right for the original quantity, and it is not padding — the suet needs long, gentle heat to melt through the crumbs. A smaller basin or several individual moulds will be done in one to one and a half hours.
- BindingTwo eggs and two tablespoons of jam are the only moisture. If the mixture will not hold together when squeezed, add milk a tablespoon at a time until it drops heavily from the spoon.
- Sauce and yieldThe sauce is simply warmed preserves, loosened with a spoonful of water or lemon juice and strained if you want it clear. The pudding serves four to six; rest it five minutes before turning out.
Snowdon pudding takes its name from the Welsh mountain and is generally traced to the inns at its foot, where it was served to nineteenth-century walkers and climbers — the Pen-y-Gwryd hotel is the house usually credited. A version is usually said to appear in Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover's The First Principles of Good Cookery (1867), part of her campaign to record Welsh cooking and language, and it spread into English and North American household books; the raisin-studded moulds were sometimes said to be shaped in imitation of the mountain itself. That it turns up here under a contributor's name, Madame E. Pernet, is typical of The Home Cook Book, which was assembled from recipes donated by women in Toronto and other Canadian cities and towns in 1877 and sold to support the Hospital for Sick Children — a Welsh mountain pudding travelling by way of the British cookbook trade into a Canadian charity subscription volume.