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English Plum Pudding
One-half pound butter, one-half pound suet chopped fine, onehalf pound sugar, one and one-fourth pounds flour, one pound raisins seeded and chopped, one pound currants, one-fourth pound citron, one cup milk, six eggs, one and one-half cups brandy, onefourth ounce cloves, one-half ounce mace, one grated nutmeg. Cream the butter and sugar; add the yolks of the eggs, then the milk; after having beaten it well, whip the whites of the eggs, and put in alternately with the flour, then the spice, lastly the fruit. Steam from three to four hours. Wine or brandy sauce.
A full-sized Victorian steamed pudding: about five pounds of batter and fruit, enough for twelve to sixteen servings. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions and the spicing need translating before you commit.
- The hinge: room for expansionFill the buttered mould or basin only two-thirds, cover it tightly with pleated parchment and foil, and tie it down. A pudding this dense will push a loose lid off and take on water, which turns the crumb gluey.
- Steaming time and donenessThree to four hours is right for a single large basin, but only if the water never stops simmering and is topped up with boiling water as it falls. The pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the centre reads about 200F.
- SuetBeef suet is the shredded fat from around the kidneys, sold packaged in the UK and available from butchers elsewhere. Half a pound frozen and grated on the coarse side of a box grater behaves best; butter alone will make a heavier, greasier pudding.
- Spice quantitiesA quarter ounce of ground cloves is roughly a tablespoon, and half an ounce of mace something under three. That is aggressive by modern palates; a teaspoon of cloves and two of mace with the grated nutmeg gives a pudding that still tastes Victorian without the medicinal edge.
- Currants and citronZante currants are the small dried grapes, not fresh red or black currants. Candied citron is still sold at Christmas; chop it fine, and toss all the fruit with a spoonful of the measured flour so it suspends rather than sinking.
- The brandyA cup and a half goes into the batter itself; some of the alcohol cooks off over three to four hours of steaming and some remains. The brandy, along with the sugar, fat and dried fruit, helps the pudding keep.
- No leavening, by designThere is no baking powder or soda, and no breadcrumbs. Lift comes only from the whipped whites, so fold them in rather than beating them down, and expect a close, moist crumb rather than a cake.
- Keeping and reheatingCool in the basin, re-cover, and store somewhere cool for several weeks or longer; the flavour improves. Reheat by steaming for an hour before serving with the brandy sauce called for.
Plum pudding descends from a medieval and Tudor pottage of meat broth thickened with breadcrumbs, dried fruit and spice, and the "plums" of the name are raisins and currents rather than any fresh fruit. By the seventeenth century the broth had gone, the mixture had stiffened into something that could be tied in a cloth and boiled, and by the middle of the nineteenth it was fixed as the Christmas dish of English-speaking households on both sides of the Atlantic. Its appearance in an American dessert chapter of this period is unremarkable: the pudding travelled with the holiday, and the suet, the long steam and the cup and a half of brandy all belong to a kitchen that expected to make such things weeks ahead and let them sit. Steaming rather than boiling in a floured cloth, as here, was the newer method, and the one that survived into modern practice.