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English Plum Pudding
1 cupful breadcrumbs, 1 cupful flour, 1 cupful brown sugar, 1/2 cupful Crisco, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder, 1 teaspoonful mixed spices, 3 eggs, 1 cupful milk, 1/2 cupful seeded raisins, 1/2 cupful chopped candied citron peel, 1 cupful currants, 1/2 cupful chopped preserved ginger, 1/4 cupful brandy, 1/2 cupful chopped English walnut meats. Mix flour with breadcrumbs, add Crisco, sugar, salt, baking powder, spices, nuts, fruit, milk, eggs well beaten, and brandy. Pour into Criscoed mold, cover with greased paper and steam steadily for four hours. Turn out and serve with liquid or hard sauce. The brandy may be omitted.
A quick, chemically leavened plum pudding rather than the long-aged suet kind — it uses baking powder and vegetable shortening, so it is meant to be steamed and eaten, not matured for months.
- The hinge: steady steamThe mold must sit on a rack in gently simmering water, covered, with the water kept at least halfway up the sides for the full four hours. Top up with boiling water as it drops; if the pan boils dry the pudding scorches and the batter sets unevenly.
- CriscoCrisco here is plain hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book is a Crisco advertisement. Half a cupful of butter or of modern shortening works; suet gives a more traditional texture but the recipe was not built around it.
- Mold sizeThe batter runs to roughly 8 cups, so use a 3-quart pudding basin or mold, or divide between two smaller ones, filling no more than two-thirds full to leave room for rise. Serves 8 to 10 in the small wedges this sort of pudding is meant to be cut into.
- "Mixed spices"British mixed spice: mostly cinnamon and nutmeg with allspice, cloves, ginger and coriander. A teaspoonful of pumpkin-pie spice is the closest supermarket equivalent.
- BreadcrumbsThe recipe does not specify; many period puddings use crumbs from stale bread, though fresh soft crumbs also appear. Fresh crumbs carry more moisture and can make the pudding heavier, so dry them briefly in a low oven if you want a lighter result.
- Candied fruitCandied citron peel is still sold at Christmas but is often replaced now by mixed candied peel. Preserved (stem) ginger in syrup is the intended article — drain it before chopping, or the syrup slackens the batter.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red currants. If they are hard, a short soak in hot water or in the brandy improves them.
- Covering the moldGreased paper alone lets condensation in. Add a layer of foil over it and tie or crimp it down, and pleat the covering so the pudding can rise.
- Keeping and reheatingBecause it is baking-powder raised and has little alcohol, this pudding does not keep like a matured Christmas pudding. Refrigerate leftovers and re-steam slices for 20 to 30 minutes to serve.
This is a plum pudding rewritten for the American shortening trade: A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble published to teach cooks to use Crisco after its 1911 introduction, which is why the fat is named as a brand in the ingredient list and why "Criscoed mold" appears as a verb. The dish it is adapting is much older — the English boiled pudding is generally traced to medieval spiced meat-and-fruit pottages, and "plum" retains the old sense of any dried fruit, raisins and currants rather than plums. The traditional version relies on beef suet and months of aging in brandy; this one substitutes vegetable fat, adds baking powder for lift, and offers the brandy as optional. The steaming time is the one thing left untouched.