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Suet Pudding (One cup of suet chopped fine)
One cup of suet chopped fine, one cup chopped raisins, one cup of molasses, one cup of sweet milk, three teaspoons Cook's Friend baking powder; spice to your taste; four cups of flour; mix and steam three hours.
A plain steamed pudding of the sort that once occupied a back burner all afternoon. Everything here still works; the only real decisions are the fat, the mould, and how you keep the water going for three hours.
- The hinge: steam, never boil drySet the covered mould on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up its side, and keep a kettle going to top it up. If the water gets into the pudding or the pot runs dry, three hours of work is lost.
- SuetBeef kidney fat, sold by butchers on request and often available frozen and pre-shredded. It should be cold and hard when chopped; if it smears rather than crumbles, chill it or grate it from frozen. Vegetarian shredded suet substitutes fairly well in texture.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand widely advertised when this book appeared. Use ordinary double-acting baking powder, three teaspoons for four cups of flour, which is on the low side by modern standards but adequate in a steamed batter that never has to hold a risen crumb.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because sour milk and buttermilk were the ordinary alternatives and would have called for soda instead of baking powder.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate. The pudding takes its colour and most of its sweetness from this one cup.
- Spice to your tasteThe recipe leaves it open. A common combination for puddings of this sort is cinnamon with nutmeg, allspice and a little clove; about two teaspoons in total suits this quantity. Salt is unmentioned but wanted, roughly half a teaspoon.
- Mould and volumeThe batter runs to roughly two quarts, so use a 3 quart basin or covered mould, or divide between two smaller ones, greased and filled no more than two-thirds. Cover with pleated parchment and foil, or a floured cloth tied under the rim, so condensation cannot run in.
- Yield and servingServes eight to ten. It is meant hot, with a hard sauce, a lemon or vanilla pudding sauce, or simply cream. Leftovers slice cleanly the next day and re-steam in twenty minutes.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and is generally described as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook of its kind, built on the American model of contributed household receipts. That origin explains the shape of this recipe: it is someone's working formula, written in cups because that is how she measured, and it names a commercial baking powder by brand because such books carried advertising and their products were simply what was on the shelf. Steamed suet puddings of this type descend from the British boiled pudding tradition, where a cloth-tied batter of flour, chopped beef fat and dried fruit cooked over the same fire as the rest of dinner. By the 1870s chemical leavening was increasingly used in puddings of this kind, and the result is this: one bowl, and three unattended hours.