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Eggless Plum Pudding
Heaping cup bread-crumbs, two cups flour, one of suet chopped fine, one of raisins, one of molasses, one of sweet milk, table-spoon soda, tea-spoon salt, one of cloves, and one of cinnamon; boil two and a half hours in a two-quart pail, set in a kettle of boiling water or steam for the same time. For sauce take one cup white sugar, butter size of an egg, grated rind of one lemon, and white of an egg.-Mrs. Mary Lee Gere.
A steamed suet pudding that leans on soda and molasses instead of eggs for lift, and on long moist heat to do everything else. The measurements are 1880s cup measures, so read them as ordinary 8 oz cups and expect a dense, dark, slightly cakey pudding rather than a soft batter.
- The hinge: keep the water boilingThe pudding rises from soda alone, so the steam has to be constant from the moment the pail goes in. Top up with boiling water from a kettle as it evaporates; adding cold water drops the temperature and gives you a sunken, gummy centre.
- Soda is overstatedSoda looks high -- A full tablespoon of soda for two cups of flour is more than one cup of molasses will neutralise, and the surplus can taste soapy and darken the crumb. One to two teaspoons is closer to the modern proportion for this much molasses, though period recipes often specified more.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, is the traditional fat and gives the characteristic set crumb. Ask a butcher, or use shredded packaged suet; frozen grated butter is a common substitute, though it makes a softer pudding.
- "Two-quart pail"Any 2-quart heatproof mould, pudding basin or coffee can will do. Grease it, fill no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with foil or a tied cloth so condensation does not run into the batter.
- Bread-crumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not the fine commercial kind, and not fresh soft crumbs measured loosely. A heaping cup of dry crumbs is roughly 3 to 4 oz.
- MolassesPeriod molasses was closer to today's dark cooking molasses than to blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate. Light or full-flavour molasses gives the intended result.
- Timing and donenessTwo and a half hours is right for a filled 2-quart mould. Test with a skewer in the centre; if it comes out with wet batter, re-cover and steam in 20-minute stages.
- The sauce contains raw egg whiteCreamed sugar, butter, lemon rind and egg white make an uncooked hard sauce. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised whites or a current cooked-sauce recipe instead.
- Yield and servingServes eight to ten. Unmould hot, and reheat leftovers by steaming slices for 10 minutes; microwaving dries the suet crumb out quickly.
Eggless puddings turn up throughout late nineteenth-century American cookbooks for a simple reason: eggs were seasonal and expensive, scarce and dear in winter, which is exactly when a boiled plum pudding was wanted. Soda and molasses together supplied the leavening instead, a substitution that had become routine in domestic baking after the mid-century spread of cheap chemical raising agents. "Plum" here means raisins, as it had in British usage since long before the fruit called a plum entered the pudding at all. Buckeye Cookery was assembled from contributions by named Midwestern housewives, and this recipe carries Mrs. Mary Lee Gere's attribution in the manner of the whole book, a communal reference work rather than one author's kitchen. Its brevity is characteristic: a competent cook of the period needed only proportions and a boiling time, and would already know how to tie a cloth over a pail.