Suet Pudding
One large cupful of finely chopped suet, one cupful molasses, one cupful of sweet milk, one teaspoonful of soda, half in milk and half in molasses, five cupfuls of flour, one cupful of currants, two cupfuls stoned raisins. Spice to taste, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg and a little ginger; also salt. The whole preparation should be well kneaded. Steam from five to seven hours. Allow room in the molds for swelling. What remains of a pudding can be mashed and molded into a smaller form and steamed over.
Serve with brandy or lemon sauce. A cupful of chopped nuts may be added to the pudding.
A dense, kneaded steamed pudding of the boiled-pudding family, stiff enough to handle rather than pour. The original assumes you know how a pudding mold and a steaming kettle behave, so the practical detail is worth spelling out.
- Keep the water at a bare simmer, and never let it run dryA five-to-seven hour steam means topping up the kettle with boiling water every hour or so. Cold water added to a hot kettle can stall the cooking and, worse, an empty kettle will scorch the mold and the pudding with it.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers on request and sometimes frozen in shredded form. It melts at a higher temperature than butter, which is generally credited with keeping suet puddings lighter than they would otherwise be. Frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh, and vegetable suet substitutes behave similarly if less richly.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because sour milk was the common alternative in period baking and would change how the soda behaves. Whole milk is the right choice.
- The split sodaThe recipe divides the teaspoonful between the milk and the molasses, presumably to distribute it evenly, since the acid in the molasses begins reacting with the soda as soon as the two meet. Stir each in just before combining and do not let the mixture stand.
- Currants and stoned raisinsCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh red or black ones. "Stoned" means the seeds have been picked out, a chore that vanished with seedless varieties; modern raisins need no preparation, though plumping the fruit briefly in hot water keeps it from drawing moisture out of the dough.
- Five cupfuls of flour makes a dough, not a batterThe instruction to knead is literal. Expect something closer to a stiff bread dough than a cake batter, and expect to work the fruit in by hand.
- Room for swellingFill molds or pudding basins no more than two-thirds. Cover tightly with a pleated round of parchment and foil, or a floured cloth tied down, so condensation cannot run in and waterlog the top.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the sides. This is a large quantity -- more than a two-quart mold will hold once you allow room for swelling -- so plan on dividing it between molds; it will serve ten or twelve, as it is rich and portions are small.
- Resteaming leftoversThe mashed-and-remolded trick works, and steamed puddings reheat well. Allow about an hour of steam for a reheated portion, or wrap slices and steam them fifteen to twenty minutes.
Suet puddings are the plainer American cousins of the English boiled and steamed puddings that go back at least to the seventeenth century, when the pudding cloth freed cooks from having to stuff a batter into an animal's intestine. This version, from a turn-of-the-century American household book, is essentially a working-day plum pudding: molasses instead of the more expensive sugar, currants and raisins instead of candied peel, and no eggs at all. The soda-and-molasses leavening is a distinctly nineteenth-century American habit, cheap and reliable. The note about remolding the remains is the real signature of the genre: a pudding of this size was made to be eaten across several days, and its keeping quality, thanks to the fat and the sugar, was part of the point.