Sussex Pond Pudding with a Whole Lemon

Sussex pond pudding is the most theatrical dessert in the British canon, and almost nobody makes it any more, which is a quiet tragedy. You steam a suet crust around a whole pricked lemon packed in butter and sugar for three hours, and when you turn it out and cut into it, a pond of dark, buttery, intensely lemony caramel comes flooding out onto the plate. The lemon inside has gone soft and edible, its bitterness tamed and its sharpness magnified, and the whole thing is somewhere between a pudding and a small edible miracle. It is old, it is slow, it is completely out of step with the way we cook now, and it is worth every one of its three hours.

A pudding with a pond in its name

Steamed suet puddings are one of Britain’s genuine contributions to world cooking, born of a kitchen with a pot of water over the fire and no oven. Boiling or steaming a pudding in a cloth or basin was the everyday way to cook something sweet or savoury for centuries, and it gave us a whole dynasty of them: spotted dick, jam roly-poly, spotted dog, plum duff and the great Christmas pudding. Sussex pond pudding belongs to this family and takes its name from the pool of sauce that gathers around it, the “pond”, when it is turned out.

The earliest printed recipe appears in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in 1747, though her version was a plain butter-and-sugar pudding with no lemon at all. The whole lemon is a later refinement, and its great modern champion was the food writer Jane Grigson, who included it in her English Food in 1974 and did more than anyone to rescue the pudding from obscurity. She recommended a thin-skinned lemon and plenty of pricking, and cooks have followed her ever since. There is a Kentish cousin, sometimes called Kentish well pudding, and a version made with an orange, but the lemon is the classic and the best. It sits proudly among the great steamed puddings alongside spotted dick with proper custard and jam roly-poly with vanilla custard.

The suet crust

Suet is the hard fat from around beef kidneys, sold shredded and coated in flour, and it makes a crust unlike any other: soft, slightly spongy, moist and forgiving, quite different from a butter pastry. Vegetable suet works just as well for anyone avoiding beef fat and behaves identically. The dough comes together in minutes with just flour, suet, a little sugar, salt and enough milk to make it soft and rollable; do not overwork it, or the crust toughens.

Line a well-buttered basin with three-quarters of the dough, pressing it smoothly up the sides with no cracks or thin spots, because any weakness is where the precious pond will leak out during steaming. Pack the butter, both sugars and the salt around the pricked lemon, seal the lid on firmly, and cover with pleated buttered paper and foil. The pleat matters: it gives the pudding room to rise without splitting its cover, and the foil keeps the steam out of the crust.

The long steam

Three to three and a half hours of steady, gentle steaming is what transforms the raw ingredients. The suet crust cooks through and sets, the butter and sugar melt and mingle with the lemon juice into caramel, and the lemon itself softens until its skin is tender enough to eat. The one job you must not forget is topping up the pan with boiling water; if it steams dry, the pudding scorches and the basin can crack. Set a timer to check it every forty minutes. A slow cooker set on high with water halfway up the basin does the job unattended if you would rather not babysit a pan.

Rest the pudding for ten minutes before turning out, which lets the crust firm up so it holds together when inverted. Turn it onto a plate with a real lip or a shallow bowl, because the pond is generous and a flat plate sends it over the edge and onto the table. Cut it at the table for full effect, and make sure everyone gets a share of the soft, transformed lemon, which is the best bit.

Getting ahead and keeping

Steamed puddings are forgiving of being made ahead. You can assemble the whole thing, cover it and keep it in the fridge for a day before steaming. Once cooked, it reheats beautifully: keep it covered in the basin and steam again for forty-five minutes to an hour, or microwave individual portions with their sauce for a minute or two. Leftovers keep for three days in the fridge and are, if anything, more intensely lemony the next day. It does not freeze especially well, as the crust turns dense, so it is best eaten within a few days.

Substitutions and variations

A large orange in place of the lemon gives a mellower, sweeter pond and is the traditional Kentish variation; a lime makes a sharper, more fragrant one. For a spiced winter version, add a teaspoon of ground ginger to the crust and tuck a knob of chopped stem ginger in beside the lemon. If you cannot get suet at all, a crust made with 100g of frozen, coarsely grated butter rubbed into the flour is a workable stand-in, though it bakes firmer and less spongy. Serve with cold pouring cream, which is the classic foil, or with proper custard; a scoop of vanilla ice cream against the hot caramel is very good too. After something this rich, a light, sharp pudding like cranachan makes a good contrast if you are planning a run of them, and the meringue-topped queen of puddings sits in the same nostalgic British tradition.

Where it goes wrong

Three things spoil a Sussex pond pudding. The first is a cracked or thin crust, which leaks the pond into the steaming water and leaves you with a dry pudding and nothing to pour; line the basin carefully with no weak spots. The second is an under-pricked or thick-skinned lemon, which stays bitter and refuses to give up its juice; choose thin-skinned and prick it thoroughly. The third is letting the pan boil dry, which scorches everything and can crack the basin; top up with boiling water throughout. Get those right, steam it long and slow, and you will turn out a pudding that stops conversation at the table, which is exactly what a great British pudding is supposed to do.