The April 2010 Daring Bakers' Challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.
The required elements of this challenge were:
1) to make a suet pudding using real suet or as close a replacement as we can manage or is acceptable to us; and
2) to cook it by steaming or if we want to be even more traditional by boiling tied up in a cloth.
The Original Recipe Sources:
Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course,
The pudding club,
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and the Dairy Book of Home Cooking and Esther's family’s recipe notes!
So I´m here with this British pudding recipe. It's something special, because it's my first daring bakers' challenge! I´m officially a member, wonderful! However, let's get to the pudding. The pudding is made using suet, which is pretty hard to get here in the Czech Republic. To be honest, you cannot get it almost anywhere. Even though I went to try to get some in local butcher's. In fact I visited all of them, which means six shops. In four of them I was told this: "Oooh, that's something we DO NOT have!" I got really funny answers in the remainig two stores. Once again I asked about the suet and for the first time the answer was positive. I thought I won. At least until she asked me what I wanted it for. When I told her about the British pudding, she looked at me and said: "That must be extra fresh, mustn't it?" I nodded in agreement. And then she replied: "We don't have anythig fresh in here!" So that's absolutely perfect. Well, my question was the same in the last remaining store and the reply? Pretty odd: "We don't have anything like that. We don't sell meat!" So now I know there's no meat at butcher's :D Because of this I had to replace the suet with old ordinary lard.
We had some choices - whether to do a savoury pudding or a sweet one. I chose Sussex Pond Pudding. But I tried to go wild (as Esther suggested) and changed some stuff in filling :)
