Plum Pudding
1 cup seeded Raisins, 2 cups fine Breadcrumbs, 1 cup sweet Milk, 1 even teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. mon. 1 cup picked beef Suet, 1/2 cup Currants, 1 cup Molasses, 1 teaspoonful ea. Salt, Cloves and Cinnamon.
Chop fine in the flour the picked beef suet. Add the raisins, washed currants, salt, cloves and cinna- Then add the breadcrumbs, molasses and the Soda, sweet milk and enough more flour to make a soft dough. Boil in a double boiler in a suitable pan with cover for about four hours.
A plain boiled suet pudding of the kind that turned up on American tables from Thanksgiving through New Year. The recipe is workable, but it leaves out the flour quantity and assumes you know what a steamed pudding should look like going into the pot.
- The missing flourSuet is chopped "in the flour" and more flour is added "enough to make a soft dough," but no amount is given. Expect somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 cups total; the batter should be thick enough to hold a spoon upright for a moment but still drop from it, not a kneadable dough despite the word.
- "Boil in a double boiler"This means steam, not simmer in water. Fill a covered pudding mold or heatproof bowl no more than two-thirds full, cover it tightly, and set it over or in gently boiling water for the full four hours, topping up the water as it evaporates. Letting the pot boil dry is the one thing that ruins the pudding.
- The soda"The Great Arm & Hammer Soda" is ordinary bicarbonate of soda. It is here to react with the acid in the molasses, which is what lifts a pudding containing no eggs and no baking powder. Add it with the molasses and milk as directed, and get the pudding into the steam promptly.
- Picked beef suet"Picked" means the membrane and stringy tissue have been pulled away from the hard fat around the kidneys. Butchers will still order it; shredded packaged suet sold for baking is the nearest substitute, though it is usually dusted with flour, so allow for that when judging the extra flour. Frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh.
- BreadcrumbsFine crumbs from a day-old plain loaf, dried but not toasted. Commercial dry breadcrumbs are finer and absorb differently, and may give a denser pudding.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh milk, distinguished in period recipes from sour or buttermilk. Whole milk is what is meant.
- No plumsThere are none, and none are expected. "Plum" in pudding names has meant raisins and dried currants since well before this book was printed.
- Yield and servingRoughly eight servings from a 1 1/2-quart mold. Turn it out hot and serve with hard sauce, a warm brandy or vanilla sauce, or plain cream. It reheats well by steaming for 30 to 45 minutes.
Church & Dwight issued small recipe pamphlets promoting Arm & Hammer soda, and this is one of them; here the call for a teaspoon of it is genuine. A steamed suet pudding leavened only with soda and molasses belongs to an older, cheaper line of descent than the egg-and-brandy Christmas puddings of English cookbooks. Bread crumbs in place of much of the flour, currants and raisins in place of candied peel, and molasses in place of sugar all mark it as a household pudding rather than a company one. The four-hour steam is not conservatism; it is what turns hard beef fat and coarse crumb into something dark, moist and sliceable.