PomPom Pondered About The Pudding…

For PomPom, and any others who may be wondering, here’s the lowdown on suet-

Suet is the hard white animal fat from round the kidneys of sheep and cows, which is has been used in England for over 400 years to make pastries and puddings. It is an inexpensive alternative to using butter or oil in many recipes. About 100 years ago, a way of preparing it as a dry shredded product was developed in Manchester, by M. Hugon, a Frenchman.

‘Atora’*** was created and marketed to the delight of housewives all over the country, who found it much more convenient than buying hunks of fat from their butchers. The name ‘Atora’ is believed to have been derived from ‘toro’ – the Spanish word for bull.

The Atora Factory is now in Hartlepool [where I lived as a child] and produces a vegetarian ‘light’ version, completely free of animal fats, as well as the original shredded animal suet.

To make pastry, you stir the suet with flour and a little salt, then pour in cold water. Ridiculously easy, you can blend it all in quickly with a knife and it is ready to use. My big bag from Approved Foods is a flour/suet/salt mix – I just add water. This is made by McDougalls, the flour company.

You can drop balls of suet dough into boiling liquid to cook – these are dumplings and can be savoury [on top of a casserole] or sweet [containing sugar and dried fruit and served with a sweet sauce] The county of Norfolk is famed for its wonderful dumplings

You can roll out your dough like pastry and use it to line and/or top a pie, as I did for our meal the other night. The county of Sussex has a traditional rib-sticking dessert using lemons called Sussex Pond Pudding [recipe here]

If you make a rectangle of suet pastry, spread it with jam [or golden syrup] and roll it up, that is a Roly Poly Pudding. It is usually served sliced with custard. Because this has to be wrapped in a pudding cloth whilst cooking, the outer surface is damp and pale in colour when unwrapped and served, and when sliced you see the lines of red jam inside like veins. Hence the popular alternative names of Dead Baby or Dead Man’s Leg! [recipe here]If you put dried fruit in the roll, it is called Spotted Dick.

Dumplings can be cooked in the oven or on top of the stove. Puddings are traditionally steamed for hours – but the process can be speeded up by using a pressure cooker or a microwave oven.

Important Note Suet puds are delicious but calorie-laden. If you decide to eat only part of the dish, and save the rest for supper NEVER attempt to reheat suet puds in the microwave. They will become inedible and chewy – corrugated cardboard would be tastier. Either reheat leftover pud in a regular oven or eat cold [perhaps with hot custard]

So PomPom, now you know.

And to answer your other question, PP, Bob’s cake was a Pecan Plait – we were originally going to share a toasted teacake, but then we noticed they had reduced the PP’s from 89p to 19p as it was almost closing time at the cafe, so we had one each. We love PPs!

[***check the Atora company website here for the full history and good recipes]