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Suet Pudding (IV)
Mrs. J. Kent.
One cup of suet, one cup of sour milk, one-half spoon soda, one cup sugar, nutmeg and salt, and flour to stiffen.
This is a recipe reduced to a shopping list: Mrs. Kent assumed her reader knew that a suet pudding gets tied in a cloth or packed in a mould and steamed for hours. Everything below fills in what she left out.
- The missing instructionNothing here tells you to cook it. A batter of this stiffness goes into a greased pudding basin or mould of at least 1 1/2 quarts, covered with pleated foil or a floured cloth, and steams over simmering water for about 2 hours. Keep the water topped up and never let it boil dry.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded in some markets and by butchers on request. One cup means about 4 oz shredded and packed loosely; if you buy it in a lump, chill it hard and grate it with a little flour so it does not clump.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk in the 1870s was raw milk left to clabber, acidic enough to react with the soda. Pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than sours, so use buttermilk, or a cup of milk with a tablespoon of vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes. The recipe does not say what 'one-half spoon' means; a teaspoon is the likeliest reading, giving about 1/2 teaspoon soda.
- "Flour to stiffen"Aim for a batter that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of flour. Too much and the pudding steams into a brick; too little and it will not hold the suet in suspension.
- Nutmeg and saltNo quantities are given. A whole nutmeg grated fresh gives far more than you want here: 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg and 1/2 teaspoon of salt suit the rest of the proportions.
- A note on the sugarA cup of sugar in the batter makes this a sweet pudding on its own, unlike the plainer suet puddings meant to carry a sauce. If you plan to serve the usual hard sauce or a sweet foamy sauce alongside, cut the sugar back.
- YieldEnough for six modest servings. Suet puddings reheat well: re-steam slices for 15 minutes, or fry them in butter the next morning.
Suet puddings were the backbone of nineteenth-century North American winter cooking, inherited more or less unchanged from British practice, and The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) prints several of them one after another, each slightly different. That repetition is the point of the book: it was compiled from recipes donated by the ladies of Toronto to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, and the editors printed what they were sent rather than reconciling the versions. The result is a recipe like this one, written by a cook who never imagined a stranger reading it and so recorded only the parts she might otherwise forget. Beef suet was cheap, available from any butcher, and gave a pudding richness without butter, which was seasonal and dear; the sour milk and soda combination belongs to a household that kept a cow rather than a tin of baking powder.