In 1946 George Orwell was commissioned by the British Council to write about food in Britain. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Britain was in the middle of a period of severe food rationing and Orwell’s manuscript, “British Cookery,” was seen as being a celebration of culinary extravagance at a time of enforced austerity. It was never published.

In this excerpt from “British Cookery,” Orwell shares a recipe for Christmas pudding. Suet is a critical ingredient in this particular pudding and there’s really no substitute for it. Butter or lard just won’t do. Unfortunately, obtaining suet may be difficult in your neighborhood. You can find it at some butcher shops. Good luck.

In the second half of the midday meal we come upon one of the greatest glories of British cookery—its puddings. The number of these is so enormous that it would be impossible to give an exhaustive list, but, putting aside stewed fruits, British puddings can be classified under three main heads: suet puddings, pies and tarts, and milk puddings.

Suet crust, which appears in innumerable combinations, and enters into savoury dishes as well as sweet ones, is simply ordinary pastry crust with chopped beef suet substituted for the butter or lard. It can be baked, but more often is boiled in a cloth or steamed in a basin covered with a cloth. Far and away the best of all the suet puddings is plum pudding, which is an extremely rich, elaborate and expensive dish, and is eaten by everyone in Britain at Christmas time, though not often at other times of the year. In simpler kinds of pudding the suet crust is sweetened with sugar and stuck full of figs, dates, currants or raisins, or it is flavoured with ginger or orange marmalade, or it is used as a casing for stewed apples or gooseberries, or it is rolled round successive layers of jam into a cylindrical shape which is called roly-poly pudding, or it is eaten in plain slices with treacle poured over it. One of the best forms of suet pudding is the boiled apple dumpling. The core is removed from a large apple, the cavity is filled up with brown sugar, and the apple is covered all over with a thin layer of suet crust, tied tightly into a cloth, and boiled.”

Recipe after the jump…