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Excellent Plum Pudding
One pound bread crumbs, one pound sugar, one pound flour, one-half pound suet, two pounds currants, two pounds rasins. one-fourth pound citron, ten eggs, a little salt, one-fourth ounce cloves, one-half ounce mace, one-fourth ounce cinnamon, a wine glass of brandy or wine; soak the bread crumbs in enough sweet milk to cover, steam from three to four hours. Wine sauce.
This is a full-sized Victorian boiled pudding: roughly eight pounds of batter before steaming, built on the old pound-for-pound proportions. Read the quantities before you start, and be ready to divide.
- Scale it firstThe listed solids alone come to about 7 3/4 lb, and nearer 10 lb once the ten eggs and the milk are in. Expect to divide it; a quarter batch fits a basin of a quart or so, filled no more than two-thirds.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded fine and tossed with a little of the flour so it stays separate. Butchers will often supply it on request; packaged shredded suet, including vegetarian versions, works in the same proportion. Frozen butter coarsely grated is the usual home substitute, though the crumb comes out denser.
- "Sweet milk"Plain fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which nineteenth-century kitchens kept as a separate ingredient for soda-raised batters.
- Currants and raisinsDried Zante currants, not fresh red currants. Four pounds of dried fruit to one pound of flour is what makes this a plum pudding rather than a cake. Older raisins needed seeding by hand; modern seedless fruit needs only a rinse and a good drying.
- Go carefully on the maceHalf an ounce of ground mace is roughly two to three tablespoons, and a quarter ounce each of cloves and cinnamon about a tablespoon each. Period ground spice may well have been coarser and less potent than a modern jar, though that is hard to pin down. A teaspoon or two of each per pound of flour is closer to modern taste.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in the baking aisle around the winter holidays. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes directly.
- Steaming setupButter the basins well, fill them no more than two-thirds, and cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down so condensation cannot get in. Set on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water halfway up the sides, lid on, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates. Letting the pot boil dry is the one failure that cannot be recovered.
- TimingThe recipe gives three to four hours, which suits basins of a quart or less; a single pudding of the full quantity is generally allowed six to eight hours. It is done when a skewer comes out clean.
- Keeping and reheatingThese puddings were made ahead. Cooled and left sealed in the basin in a cool place, they keep for weeks and improve; steam again for an hour to serve. The wine sauce called for is the standard butter, sugar and wine sauce found elsewhere in books of this period.
"Plum" here means dried fruit of any kind, a usage often said to be older than the raisin-and-currant version of the dish and one that survives in the name long after actual plums stopped appearing in it. Plum pudding descends from medieval and early modern pottages in which meat, suet, dried fruit and spice were boiled together; the meat gradually dropped out over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while the suet stayed, and by the nineteenth the pudding was firmly a sweet and firmly associated with Christmas in Britain and, by inheritance, in American households. The pound-of-this, pound-of-that structure sets out memorized proportions, and the vast dried-fruit weight signals an occasion dish: currants, raisins, citron, mace and brandy together represented real expense. Steaming rather than boiling in a floured cloth, as this recipe directs, was the tidier later method.