Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Clarifiying for Margaret

The question was asked about suet pudding (from my previous post).

The English call it plum pudding or Christmas pudding - but there are rarely if ever plums in it.  You know, it's the dessert from The Christmas Carol and Tiny Tim ate it. 

Suet is the fat from roast beef.  It's used in the pudding to make it so decadently good that you only will eat the stuff on special occasions. 

Real suet (or plum or Christmas) pudding is actually made with a hunk of suet from the butcher that you grind or mince and then add a lot of the same ingredients that you put in fruit cake.  Finally you steam it for hours -- or if you are lucky you find a decent recipe that can be made in the microwave. 

Here is a pretty good recipe for suet pudding (made in the microwave) from a blog called Lavender and Love:  Microwave Suet Pudding with fruit

My mother steamed hers in orange juice and vegetable cans. 

It was always topped with wonderful hard sauce, the pudding served steamy hot and the hard sauce chunky cold.

The Food Network's recipe for hard sauce is perfect and their steamed suet pudding is good, too. 















1 comment:

Margaret said...

I can't imagine the fat from roast beef in a dessert. Ack! Does it just make it super moist? I have to look up the recipe for hard sauce since I have no idea what that is either. :)