In days gone by British cookbooks were full of recipes featuring suet. Those were the type of cookbooks that never mentioned things like garlic, broccoli or strangely-coloured lettuce.
Doing a bit of reorganization in the Campo larder we found a couple of boxes of Atora light suet and went in search of recipes. Atora has its own excellent website, which can be found at www.atora.net. The larder search also produced a packet of Whitworths luxury mixed dried fruit soaked in rum. The fruit included sultanas, currants, seedless raisins, chopped pineapple, apricots, citrus peel, glace cherries and, of course, rum.
Putting the suet and the fruit together led to an idea for a traditional steamed pudding.
Ingredients, to serve six people: 150g or six ounces of self-raising flour, 75g or 3 ounces of Atora suet, 75g or three ounces of caster sugar, one beaten egg, milk to mix. 75g or three ounces of dried mixed fruit, or currants, or sultanas or raisins.
Get ready a big ovenproof bowl that can hold abut 750ml or one and a half pints, a sheet of greaseproof paper and kitchen aluminum foil.
Mix the flour, the suet and the sugar together. Put in the egg and mix up with a bit of milk to make soft dough. Then add the dried fruit.
Put the mix into the bowl and cover the surface with greaseproof paper. Put aluminum foil over the top of the bowl and tie around with string to stop the water getting in during cooking. Put the bowl into a large pan with water that comes about three quarters of the way up the bowl. Then bring to the boil, turn down a little, put the lid on the pan and steam for two hours.
Our pudding came out absolutely delicious and very light. Sharon said: “It was yummy, especially the cherries. The fruit was all soft and juicy and was spotted throughout the pudding. There was fruit in every spoonful.”
According to Atora, one the earliest mentions of suet is made in a recipe dated 1617. It was a key ingredient for “Cambridge Pudding” which was served to students in the famous university city. From the end of the 17th century suet puddings really became popular, often containing whole apples or other fruit. Meat puddings were also made using left-over minced meat, mixed with egg, milk and spices.
Suet is actually beef or mutton fat, especially the hard fat found around the loins and kidneys. It was complicated and time consuming to prepare but a Frenchman living in Manchester, Gabriel Hugon, set up the first factory to manufacture shredded suet. In 1893 he opened the Atora suet factory in Openshaw, Manchester. The new product was an immediate hit with cooks.
The word “Atora” is thought to come from the Spanish word for a bull, toro. And this may be true as Atora suet comes from beef cattle. Wagons carrying Atora traveled the country pulled by pairs of huge Hereford bullocks. Captain Scott took suet on his trek to the Antarctic in the 1900s. Today more than 2,300 tons of Atora is sold in Britain each year.
Normally, we use Atora to make delicious dumplings for stews and casseroles, popping them in about 20 minutes before the end of cooking. The 2,300 tons would make more than one million dumplings a day.
With the difficult economic times currently being experienced there is a big interest in traditional dishes. So get cooking with suet.
For our steamed suet pudding we used Atora Light, shredded vegetable suet, which has 30 per cent less fat than the traditional type. This is ideal for vegetarians as it is made from vegetable oils, wheat flour and pectin.
Next we are going to try making proper steak and kidney pudding.
A tip is that you should always top up the steaming pud pan with boiling water. If you use cold water the pudding will turn out heavy.
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©Phillip Bruce
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