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Christmas Plum Pudding
One quart seeded raisins, pint currants, half pint citron cut up, quart of apples peeled and chopped, a quart of fresh and nicely chopped beef-suet, a quart of sweet milk, a heaping quart of stale bread-crumbs, eight eggs beaten separately, pint sugar, grated nutmeg, tea-spoon salt; flour fruit thoroughly from a quart of flour, then mix remainder as follows: In a large bowl or tray put the eggs with sugar, nutmeg and milk, stir in the fruit, bread-crumbs and suet, one after the other until all are used, adding enough flour to make the fruit stick together, which will take about all the quart; dip pudding-cloth in boiling-water, dredge on inside a thick coating of flour, put in pudding and tie tightly, allowing room to swell, and boil from two to three hours in a good-sized pot with plenty of hot water, replenishing as needed from tea-kettle. When done, turn in a large flat dish and send to table with a sprig of holly, or any bit of evergreen with bright berries, stuck in the top. Serve with any pudding-sauce. This recipe furnishes enough for twenty people, but if the family is small, one-half the quantity may be prepared, or it is equally good warmed over by steaming. For sauce, cream a half pound sweet butter, stir in three-quarters pound brown sugar, and the beaten yolk of an egg; simmer for a few moments over a slow fire, stirring almost constantly; when near boiling add a half pint bottled grape-juice, and serve after grating a little nutmeg on the surface.-Mrs. Ex-Gov. Coke, Texas.
A full-sized Victorian boiled pudding, measured entirely by volume. The quantities are enormous by modern standards and the cloth technique is the part most likely to trip up a cook who has never done it.
- The measuresA quart is 4 cups, a pint 2 cups, a half pint 1 cup. Fruit and crumbs are measured loose by volume, not weight, so a quart of chopped suet is roughly a pound and the quart of stale bread-crumbs somewhere around 8 ounces, depending on how coarse and how dry they are.
- Halve itThe recipe openly yields enough for twenty and suggests halving. Even a half batch makes something over three quarts of mixture, so allow a basin of at least that size or a good large cloth; the full batch is a bowling ball of a pudding and needs a stockpot.
- Boiling time is shortTwo to three hours will cook a half batch through, but a full-sized pudding of this mass wants five to six hours of steady simmering. Test the centre: it should be uniformly dark and set, with no wet crumb.
- The cloth is the hingeScald the cloth, then dredge the inside heavily with flour before the batter goes in. The flour and hot water form a paste skin that keeps water out; a dry or thinly floured cloth lets the pudding become sodden at the surface.
- Room to swell, and off the bottomTie loosely enough for expansion, and keep the pudding from resting directly on the pot bottom with an inverted plate or a trivet, or the bottom scorches. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top up only from the boiling kettle so the pot never drops off the boil.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard kidney fat, not trimmings; ask a butcher or buy shredded suet. Chop or grate it while very cold. Butter can substitute but gives a denser, less open crumb.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in tubs at Christmas or from baking suppliers. Mixed candied peel is the usual modern stand-in.
- The sauceHalf a pound of butter, three-quarters of a pound of brown sugar and one yolk. Stir almost constantly, as the recipe says, and add the grape juice when the mixture is near boiling. Makes about 3 cups.
- ReheatingAs the original says, steam it again. Forty-five minutes to an hour in the cloth or basin over simmering water; a microwave dries the crumb.
Buckeye Cookery (Minneapolis and Ohio editions, from 1877) gathered contributions from housekeepers across the country, and the attribution here to the wife of an ex-governor of Texas is typical of how the book borrowed prestige from its correspondents. The pudding itself is thoroughly English: the "plum" in plum pudding means raisins, not fresh plums, a usage that dates from the era when dried fruit generally went by that name, and the dish descends from earlier boiled and spiced meat puddings that gradually shed their meat while keeping the suet. Boiling in a floured cloth rather than a basin was the older method, and seems to have remained common in American kitchens of the 1870s, though basins were also in use by then; the flourish of holly stuck in the top belongs to the same Victorian Christmas that gave the pudding its fixed place at the end of the meal. That the recipe suggests halving it, or steaming the leftovers, is a reminder that this was food built for a household with many mouths and no refrigeration to waste.