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Steam Pudding (II)
Mrs. B.
Two cups flour, half cup suet, one cup sugar, one cup milk, one egg, a teaspoonful of soda, fruit to suit your taste; steam two and a half hours.
A plain suet pudding of the type that filled out a nineteenth-century dinner, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you had made one before. The gaps are all in the equipment and the leavening.
- The mould matters mostButter a 2-quart pudding basin or covered mould (the batter here comes to roughly 4 to 5 cups) and fill it no more than two-thirds, since the batter climbs as it steams. Cover tightly with a lid or with buttered foil tied down, or condensation will drip in and leave the top sodden.
- How to steam itStand the mould on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, lid on, water kept at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; if the pot boils dry the pudding scorches.
- SuetHalf a cup means beef suet, chopped or grated fine, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 oz. Ask a butcher, or buy shredded packaged suet. Frozen suet grates much more easily. Cold unsalted butter, grated, is a common substitute, though it changes the crumb.
- The sodaA full teaspoon of soda with sweet milk and no acid is more than the batter needs and can leave a soapy taste. Either use buttermilk or sour milk in place of the sweet milk, or substitute baking powder -- about 2 to 3 teaspoons -- for the soda.
- "Fruit to suit your taste"About a cup of raisins, currants, chopped dates or dried figs is the intended range. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink to the bottom of the mould.
- Timing and testingTwo and a half hours is correct for this size; the pudding is meant to be dense and moist rather than cakey. A skewer into the centre should come out clean. Let it stand five minutes before turning out, or it may slump.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. The recipe gives no sauce, but puddings of this kind were commonly served with one: a hard sauce, a thin egg-and-sugar sauce, or simply cream.
Steamed suet puddings were a mainstay dessert of the English-speaking kitchen through the nineteenth century, and community cookbooks often group several together, each contributed by a different woman and each distinguished largely by the leavening or the fruit -- which may be why this one carries only a bare "(II)" and the attribution to Mrs. B. The appeal was practical: no oven was required, which mattered when oven heat was hard to regulate, and the pudding could sit over a slow fire while the rest of dinner was managed. Suet, the hard fat from around beef kidneys, was cheap and a normal part of household provisioning, and its firmness and relatively high melting point are usually credited with giving these puddings their close, moist crumb. Soda leavening of this sort became common once saleratus and later bicarbonate of soda were widely sold; earlier steamed puddings more often relied on eggs and beating, or on yeast and bread.