Steamed carrot pudding

Press, 18 July 1979, Page 17

Steamed carrot pudding

If you grow carrots, or buy them cheaply, you should try making this steamed carrot pudding. It is a dark, well-flavoured pudding with a light texture. 1 find that it is very popular with my family — they like it better, in fact, than steamed puddings made with dried fruit. For six servings: 100 g butter 2 cups finely grated carrots 1 egg 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup flour J teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon cinnamon Melt, butter in a me-dium-sized saucepan. As soon as it is liquid, remove it from the heat. While butter cools grate the carrots, and measure them, without packing them tightly into the cup. With a fork, stir them into the butter with the egg and sugar. Sift into this mixture the flour, baking soda and cinnamon, and stir until mixed. The thickness of the mixture depends on the carrots. If the mixture seems very thin, stir in about \ cup flour.

The final mixture should be thinner than a butter cake mixture, you should be able to pour rather than spoon it into a well greased bowl of four to five-cup capacity. Cover bowl with foil, pressing the sides down

firmly. Steam for two hours. NOTE: Leftover pudding may be sliced and used as a cake, or butterd and included in. school lunches, etc. SURPRISE PUDDING 1 know that some people will be horrified at the amount of butter used in this recipe, and will be even more shocked when they realise the butter is added “neat” — and find there is suet in the recipe as well. In fact, however, 500 g of puff pastry contains as much, if not more total fat than this pudding. This is an excellent cold-weather pudding — one that does not call for fresh or dried fruit, but which is sure to please hungry, active adolescents. It is not a new idea — this type of pudding has been eaten in England for at least 200 years. Six servings: 2 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder |-1 cup shredded suet ? cup milk 100 g butter J cup brown sugar Thoroughly mix the unsifted flour and baking powder with the suet. Add the milk, using a little extra, if necessary, to produce a soft dough. Grease a metal bowl of four to five cup capacity.

Divide the dough in two pieces, one twice as big as the other. Pat or roll the larger piece on a floured board until it is the size of a bread and butter plate. Put this into the greased bowl. Cut a IOOg slice of butter into four cubes. Put these in the dough-lined bowl with the brown sugar. Pat out the remaining dough so it covers the other piece of dough. Press the edges together firmly. Cover the bowl with foil, pressing the edges down firmly. Lower into a rack (or saucer) in a saucepan containing enough boiling water to come halfway up the bowl. Cover pot tightly and steam for 1J to 2 hours, keeping the water bubbling gently. Invert on to a serving dish.. When cut, each slice should have a caramel filling, with some of the filling liquid enough to act as a sauce. Variation: Add a slice of unpeeled orange or lemon to.jhe filling, so the sauce is slighly flavoured by the citrus fruit. . SHREDDED SUET Suet is made from the hard fat around , kidneys. It is an easy matter to make suet for use in suet crusts, steamed puddings,

etc, if you buy some kidney fat from your butcher. Chill the fat before you work with it, since it is easier to handle when it is hard and brittle, rather than warm and oily. Remove any large or thick pieces of fibrous “skin” then grate or mince the cold fat. Sort through the shredded suet and discard any large or discoloured pieces. Dust the suet with flour or cornflour, using just enough to stop the pieces from sticking together. Store it in sealed plastic bags in the freezer until you need it (up to six months). Refrigerator temperatures are not low enough to keep the suet from discolouring and spoiling after several days. Suet made this way is

considerably cheaper than most other fats, although it cannot be kept at ordinary room temperatures like commercially made suet. If you do not have suet, you can replace it with similar weights of butter or dripping in pudding recipes, etc. This will not give identical results but will be close enough, unless the proportion of fat to flour is very high. Suet is not an essential ingredient to Christmas mincemeat. P.S. I make more suet than I need, so that we can feed some of it to waxeyes during cold weather. We spoon suet into long thin cylinders made from onion bags, or into plastic-mesh fruit bags, and attach these to branches with twist ties.

ALISON HOLST KITCHEN DIARY