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Suet Pudding (V)
Miss M.
Take three-quarters of a lb. of suet, three eggs, and half pint of milk, flour sufficient to make a thick batter; to be well mixed together, and the suet not chopped too small; boil two hours. *OUR OWN LITTLE PUDDINGS," Miss. Brokovski.
Boil half a pint of milk, pour it over the crumbs of a "penny roll" or a "Sally Lunn" stale, two eggs, two ounces suet chopped fine, a little grated lemon peel, twelve bitter or sweet almonds; sweeten to your taste, with fine sugar, and a little nutmeg; bake in teacup; sweet sauce put over it.
Two puddings run together in one entry: a plain boiled suet batter from Miss M., and Miss Brokovski's baked bread-and-almond custard. The second calls for bitter almonds, which is why this page is here for reading rather than cooking.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted. Twelve of them is not a trivial dose in a pudding baked in teacups and divided among a few eaters, particularly for children. Their sale for eating is prohibited in the United States and restricted elsewhere; a current recipe should be used instead.
- Why the recipe offers a choice"Bitter or sweet" was a real option in a Victorian larder: bitter almonds were a common source of strong almond flavour, sold by grocers and druggists alongside ratafias and cordials. Period sources that discuss the hazard at all tend to frame it as a question of quantity rather than of avoiding the kernels altogether.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys. Miss M. is deliberate about not chopping it too small: coarse pieces melt slowly during the long boil and leave the pudding open and light, while finely minced suet renders out early and makes it heavy.
- Penny roll and Sally LunnA penny roll was a small plain white bread roll sold at that price. A Sally Lunn is a rich, lightly sweet yeast bread, so the two are not interchangeable in sweetness; the recipe assumes whichever is stale in the house.
- No temperature given"Bake in teacup" tells you the vessel and nothing else. Nineteenth-century range cookery was judged by hand and by experience, and the writer assumed her reader knew what heat a small custard wanted.
- Boiling a suet puddingMiss M. gives two hours but no vessel. The usual practice for such a batter was a floured cloth or a buttered basin lowered into boiling water and topped up as it fell, so the pudding was never uncovered; the timing suggests one large pudding rather than portions.
- YieldNeither pudding is given a yield. Three-quarters of a pound of suet with three eggs and half a pint of milk is a substantial boiled pudding for a family; the baked version, from half a pint of milk and two eggs, would fill a handful of teacups.
Suet puddings were the backbone of nineteenth-century domestic cookery on both sides of the Atlantic: cheap fat, stale bread or flour, and a pot of boiling water already on the range for something else. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877, was among the earliest charitable community cookbooks in North America, and gathered its recipes by name from contributing women, which is why two quite different puddings sit here under one heading with their donors credited. Bitter almonds appear regularly in recipes of the period, in ratafias, macaroons and custards, before commercial benzaldehyde-based almond extract made the kernels unnecessary; their toxicity was recognised in the medical literature of the day, though cookbooks of the period seldom remarked on it.