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Huckleberry Pudding
Remove fibres from a half pound fresh beef suet and chop very fine. Sift half pound flour on a table, make a small fountain in centre; place suet with a half pint water into the fountain, with half teaspoon salt, knead the whole well together to a perfect paste; roll it out on corner of a lightly floured table to a fifth of an inch in thickness. Butter a quart bowl and line the interior with the paste.
Wash and thoroughly wipe one and a half pounds fresh huckleberries, place them in a bowl with half pound sugar, two ounces flour, one egg, a teaspoon vanilla essence and two tablespoons rum. Mix well, then fill the bowl, wet the edge, cover with a layer of the rolled-out paste and gently press the edges together. Wrap in a strong, clean buttered cloth, plunge into boiling water for one hour, remove, unwrap, turn it on a dish, pour a rum sauce over and serve.
A boiled suet pudding of the English school, filled with American berries. The method is straightforward, but several of the quantities and the boiling time need attention before it will turn out cleanly.
- The hinge: seal and cover the basinWater getting into the pudding is a chief failure mode. The pastry lid must be pressed firmly to a wetted rim, and the buttered cloth tied tightly under the lip of the bowl so nothing seeps in. Modern practice adds a pleated round of parchment and foil under the cloth to allow for expansion.
- SuetFresh beef suet from a butcher is the original, and it needs the membranes stripped and the fat chopped or grated cold. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works directly and is what most cooks will find; the same 8 oz applies.
- Water quantityHalf a pint (1 cup) to half a pound of flour will give a slack, unmanageable dough. Suet crust normally takes about half that. Add the water gradually and stop when the paste just comes together.
- Rolling and liningA fifth of an inch is thinner than most suet crusts are rolled; aim for a scant quarter inch. Cut a wedge from the round before lining so the paste overlaps rather than pleats in the base of the bowl.
- Boiling timeOne hour is not enough for a raw suet crust around a cold filling. Puddings of this size are usually boiled or steamed two to two and a half hours; the water should return to a bare boil and stay there, topped up with boiling water as it drops.
- HuckleberriesTrue huckleberries are wild and rarely sold. Cultivated blueberries substitute directly at the same weight, though they are sweeter and juicier, so the 2 oz of flour in the filling is doing necessary work as a thickener.
- The egg and the rumOne whole egg binds a pound and a half of fruit only loosely; expect a soft, jammy interior rather than a set one. The 2 tablespoons of rum are for flavour and will not cook off entirely in a sealed pudding.
- Rum sauceNone is given. The period standard is a hard sauce of creamed butter and powdered sugar with rum beaten in, or a warm custard or cornflour sauce spiked the same way.
- YieldA quart bowl serves four to six. Let it stand five minutes after unwrapping before inverting, or the crust may slump.
Boiled and steamed suet puddings were the backbone of English domestic cookery for two centuries, and the technique here — a paste of flour, chopped suet and water lining a buttered basin, sealed with a lid of the same paste and boiled in a floured or buttered cloth — belongs to the nineteenth-century development of the crust-lined pudding basin, its eighteenth-century predecessors having been cooked characteristically in a cloth or bag. What marks this version as American is the filling: huckleberries, the wild dark berries of the Gaylussacia and Vaccinium genera, were gathered rather than farmed and were a summer staple across the Northeast and upper South well into the twentieth century. Books of this period use "huckleberry" and "blueberry" almost interchangeably, and the distinction was often a regional habit rather than a botanical one — here an English pudding technique carrying a distinctly American fruit.