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Suet Pudding
Mrs. J. H. Brown.
Two cups of chopped suet, two of raisins, two of molasses, four of flour, one of milk, three teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder; boil three and one half-hours; eat while hot. Sauce for same: One cup of sugar, one-half of butter, one egg, one tablespoon of wine or vinegar; beat fifteen minutes and heat to a scald.
A plain boiled molasses-and-suet pudding of the sort that fed large Victorian households cheaply. The measurements are all in cups and the method is assumed rather than described, so a few things need filling in.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; ask a butcher, or buy shredded suet in a box. Two cups chopped is roughly 8 oz. Frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh, and the shreds should stay in visible flecks rather than being worked into the flour.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand, still made, and at this date most likely a single-acting powder. Three teaspoons of any modern double-acting baking powder does the same job in four cups of flour.
- MolassesNineteenth-century recipes mean an ordinary cooking molasses, not blackstrap. Blackstrap is markedly more bitter and will dominate the pudding; use light or fancy molasses.
- How it is boiledThe pudding goes into a greased and floured pudding basin or mould, large enough to leave headroom for rising (these quantities make a bulky pudding, so a single small basin will not hold it), covered with pleated foil or a floured cloth tied down, and sits on a rack in a covered pot of simmering water reaching halfway up the sides. Steam or boil, not bake.
- Topping up the waterThree and a half hours will boil a pot dry. Keep boiling water at hand and add it as the level drops so the pot never runs low and the pudding never stops steaming.
- The sauceThis is a foamy or "scald" sauce, not hard sauce. Beat the sugar, softened butter and egg until pale, then heat gently over simmering water, stirring, until it thickens and steams at about 180F. Do not let it boil or the egg will curdle into threads.
- Wine or vinegarThe tablespoon of acid cuts the sweetness. Sherry or Madeira suits it; cider vinegar is the frugal substitute and works, though sparingly.
- YieldAbout eight to ten servings. It reheats well by steaming for half an hour, which matters, since the instruction to eat it hot is not decorative — suet sets firm and waxy as it cools.
Boiled suet puddings were the backbone of British and British-colonial cooking, a way of getting a hot sweet course out of a single pot on a range already crowded with the dinner. The combination here -- suet, raisins, molasses, flour -- is essentially a plain relation of Christmas plum pudding, without the brandy, spice or long keeping. Molasses was generally the cheaper sweetener, and the pudding cloth or basin needed no oven, which mattered in kitchens where the oven was small, unreliable and shared with the bread. The naming of a proprietary baking powder is characteristic of this book: contributors gave their own household brands. The attribution to Mrs. J. H. Brown is typical of the compiled community cookbook, in which each receipt carries the name of the woman who vouched for it.