Soak 1 pound of stale bread in hot milk; then add ½ pound of sugar, 1 pound of seeded raisins, and 1 pound of currants all dredged with flour, ¼ pound of chopped citron, 1 pound of finely chopped beef suet, 1 nutmeg grated, 1 tablespoonful of cinnamon, cloves and mace mixed together, a pinch of salt, 1 glass of wine and 1 glass of fine brandy. Mix with the yolks of 8 eggs and the whites beaten to a stiff froth. Pour the mixture into a wet cloth dredged with flour; tie well and let boil five hours. Serve with wine sauce.
A bread-based plum pudding rather than a flour-and-breadcrumb one, and unusually wet: the hinge is the pudding cloth. Wring it out in boiling water, flour it heavily, and tie it so the batter cannot seep, or you will lose the outside of the pudding into the pot.
- The milk is unmeasured"Soak 1 pound of stale bread in hot milk" gives no quantity. Use only enough to soften the crumb to a thick paste — roughly 2 cups for a pound of dry bread — and squeeze out any excess before mixing. Too much and the pudding will not set in the cloth.
- A glass of wineIn period cookbooks a wine glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (¼ cup), not a modern 6 oz pour. So about ¼ cup wine and ¼ cup brandy. A fortified wine such as sherry, madeira or port would be in keeping with the period, though the recipe does not specify which wine.
- Beef suetFresh suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, and it is what keeps the pudding light. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Chill it hard and grate rather than chop; a pound measures about 2 cups packed solid and considerably more once loosely grated. Butter is not a substitute here — it melts too early and the crumb turns dense.
- Dredging the fruitTossing the raisins and currants in flour keeps them suspended instead of sinking. Two or three tablespoons is enough; more will show as pale streaks.
- Boiling for five hoursThat is not an exaggeration for a pudding this size. Keep the water at a steady simmer and topped up with boiling water so it never falls below the pudding — cold water added mid-boil, or a pot boiled dry, will ruin it. Sit the pudding on a plate or trivet so the cloth does not scorch on the pan bottom.
- Cloth or basinIf a floured cloth is more than you want to manage, the same batter steams well in buttered pudding basins covered with pleated parchment and foil, tied under the rim; the full quantity will need well more than a single 2-quart basin. Same five hours.
- YieldThis is a large pudding — six pounds or more of mixture, serving sixteen or so. Well wrapped and chilled it will keep, and reheats by steaming for an hour.
- Wine sauceThe book assumes you know it: butter and sugar creamed, thinned with a beaten egg and a few tablespoons of sherry or brandy, warmed over hot water until it thickens. It must not boil or the egg will curdle.
Plum pudding has carried no plums since the eighteenth century — "plum" was the older English word for raisin, and it stuck to the dish long after the fruit named in it disappeared. The line of descent is generally traced to medieval and Tudor pottages of meat, dried fruit and spice, which lost their meat over time and kept the suet, and by the Victorian period the boiled cloth pudding was fixed as the Christmas dish, an association already established before Dickens's A Christmas Carol, which cemented rather than created it. That this version is built on soaked stale bread rather than flour is the older, thriftier line: puddings began as a way to use up bread and hard fat, and the sugar, citron, nutmeg, mace and brandy were the expensive part. Its placement on December 1 in a year-of-dishes book suits the dish, whatever the compiler intended — a proper plum pudding wants weeks of resting before it is eaten, and a cook who started on the first would have it ready by Christmas.