Suet Pastry
To three cupfuls of flour add one cupful of finely shredded beef suet, one teaspoonful of baking powder and one teaspoonful of salt. Mix with cold water, to a soft dough.
A plain suet crust of the sort used for boiled and steamed puddings, meat rolls and dumplings rather than for a rolled pie shell. The proportions are sound; the technique needs a little translation.
- The hinge: keep everything cold and handle it littleSuet pastry works because solid fat stays in shreds through the flour and melts in the steam, opening the crumb. Warm hands or over-kneading gives a heavy, close crust. Mix to a soft dough, bring it together, and stop.
- Getting the suet finely shreddedFresh beef suet from a butcher is easier to grate if it is chilled hard or briefly frozen, and grating it with a spoonful of the measured flour keeps it from clumping. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetable, substitutes cup for cup.
- QuantitiesThree cups of flour is roughly 13 oz / 375 g; one cup of shredded suet about 4 oz / 115 g. Cold water will be somewhere near three-quarters of a cup, but add it a little at a time — flour absorbency varies more than the original allows for.
- Baking powder of 1900Baking powder — A single teaspoon to three cups is a light hand by modern standards.
- SaltA full teaspoon is right for a savoury crust. For a sweet pudding — jam roly-poly, apple or fruit pudding — cut it to half a teaspoon.
- How to cook itSuet crust of this kind is most often steamed or boiled: line a greased basin, fill, cover with a pleated lid of paper or foil and steam 1½ to 2½ hours depending on the filling, keeping the water topped up. The recipe itself stops at the mixing and specifies no cooking.
- YieldEnough to line and lid a pudding basin of about two pints, or to make eight to ten dumplings for a stew.
Suet crust belongs to the British boiled-pudding tradition that came to American kitchens with the cloth-and-basin method, and it survives in this book as the cheap, forgiving cousin of butter or lard paste. Beef suet — the hard fat from around the kidneys — has a much higher melting point than butter, so it holds its shape in a long, wet cook where a short crust would collapse; that is why the same dough serves for steak-and-kidney pudding, dumplings and roly-poly. Suet was cheap enough, and the crust familiar enough, that the writer felt no need to say what to do with the dough once it was mixed. Packaged shredded suet, which made the grating unnecessary, would in time displace the fresh article on both sides of the Atlantic.