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Blackberry Pudding
Pick off stems from a pound of fresh, sound blackberries, place in a bowl with five ounces sugar and quarter gill brandy or rum, mix well in the seasoning and let infuse till required. Pick and remove fibres from a pound of beef suet, then chop very finely. Sift half a pound flour on a table, make a little fountain in the center, place in the suet with one and a half gills cold water and half teaspoon salt. Then briskly knead until well amalgamated and thoroughly firm. Roll out paste on a lightly floured table to thickness of quarter of an inch. Lightly butter a quart pudding bowl, then line with the paste. Place blackberries in the bowl, lightly egg edges of the paste. Roll out trimmings of the paste sufficiently to cover bowl. Press both edges together, so as to entirely enclose berries. Wrap bowl in a strong, buttered and floured cloth, place in saucepan with plenty boiling water and boil one hour. Remove, unwrap, turn on a dish and serve.
A boiled suet-crust pudding of the plain English sort, written in the compressed professional style of its period. Two things need attention before you start: the flour-to-suet ratio as printed, and the boiling time.
- The suet ratio looks invertedA pound of suet to half a pound of flour is roughly four times the fat of a standard suet crust, which runs about two parts flour to one part suet by weight. Whether this is a misprint or a deliberately rich paste cannot be settled from the text; halving the suet to eight ounces gives a paste that is easier to roll and line a bowl with. As printed the paste will be greasy and awkward to handle.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. A quarter gill of brandy is two tablespoons; one and a half gills of water is three quarters of a cup. Add the water gradually — flour absorbency varies and you want a firm, not sticky, dough.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, still sold by many butchers on request. Packaged shredded suet works directly. Fresh suet chops far more easily if it goes into the freezer for twenty minutes first, and the papery membrane must come off or it will string through the crust.
- Pudding bowlA quart ceramic pudding basin, or any heatproof bowl of that capacity. Butter it well; the pudding is turned out whole.
- The cloth, and a modern substituteThe floured cloth keeps water out of the crust. Buttered parchment with a foil layer over it, both pleated down the middle to allow expansion and tied under the rim with string, does the same job and is easier to manage. A string handle across the top makes lifting the hot basin out possible.
- Boiling timeOne hour is light for a raw suet crust enclosing a quart of fruit. Ninety minutes to two hours at a steady simmer gives a cooked, translucent crust. Keep the water at least halfway up the basin and top up with boiling water as it drops — cold water added mid-cook will stall the steaming.
- The blackberry juiceA pound of berries with five ounces of sugar throws a great deal of liquid, which is the point of the dish, but it also means any gap in the sealed crust will leak and the pudding will collapse on turning out. Press the lid firmly all round and trim flush.
- YieldA quart pudding serves four to six. Serve hot with cream, custard or hard sauce; it is best straight from the basin and may not hold its shape if cooled and reheated.
Boiled suet puddings, sweet and savoury alike, were the backbone of English domestic cooking from the seventeenth century onward, made possible by the pudding cloth, which freed the pudding from the animal gut it had previously been boiled in. A fruit pudding of this kind — a suet-crust shell lined into a basin, filled with sugared raw fruit, sealed and boiled until the fruit collapses into its own syrup — belongs to the same family as the better-known summer standbys built on gooseberries, damsons or apples, and blackberries were the free, hedgerow-gathered member of that group.