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English Plum Pudding
Beat six yolks and four whites of eggs very light, and add to them a tumbler of sweet milk; stir in gradually one-fourth pound grated or chopped stale bread, a pound flour, three-quarters pound sugar, and a pound each of beef-suet chopped very fine, currants nicely washed and dried, and stoned raisins, well floured; stir well, then add two nutmegs, a table-spoon mace, one of cinnamon or cloves, a wine-glass brandy, a tea-spoon salt, and finally another tumbler of milk. Boil in bowls or molds five hours, and serve with sauce made of drawn butter, wine, sugar, and nutmeg. These will keep for months; when wanted, boil one hour before using. A pound of citron or blanched sweet almonds adds to the richness of the pudding, but may be omitted. - Mrs. Collier, Bellefontaine.
A full-sized Victorian boiled pudding: roughly five pounds of batter before the fruit is counted, built on suet rather than butter and cooked by long, wet heat. The measurements assume a household's own drinking glasses, so a few need pinning down.
- Tumbler and wine-glassA tumbler in this period is about 8 fl oz, so the two called for come to two cups of milk. A wine-glass is roughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup of brandy.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; ask a butcher, since supermarket trimmings are softer and greasier. It must be chopped or grated very fine while cold so it disperses and melts slowly through the long boil, leaving the crumb open rather than heavy.
- Two nutmegs is literalWhole nutmegs, grated, each yielding about two to three teaspoons. Combined with a tablespoon each of mace and cinnamon or cloves, this is a strongly spiced pudding by modern standards; halving the nutmeg is reasonable if it is not going into a months-long store.
- Boiling in bowlsFill buttered basins about two-thirds full, cover with a pleated round of parchment and foil or a floured cloth tied under the rim, and set them on a rack in a covered pot with water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water so it never drops below the pudding.
- Five hours, and one hour laterThe long boil is not overcooking; it is what dissolves the suet and sets the crumb. The second hour before serving reheats a stored pudding all the way through, and is not optional if it has been kept cold.
- Storage"Keeps for months" assumed a cold larder, and the sugar, fat and brandy do a great deal of preserving work. A well-wrapped pudding is safest kept refrigerated, and the surface should be dry rather than tacky when you unwrap it.
- Drawn butter sauceNot simply melted butter: drawn butter is a light roux of butter and flour let down with water or milk to a pouring sauce, here finished with sugar, wine, and grated nutmeg. Do not let it boil hard once the wine goes in.
- YieldA large batch: enough to fill several good-sized molds. Splitting the batter between smaller molds makes the reheating more manageable.
Plum pudding took its name from the older sense of "plum" as any dried fruit, chiefly raisins and currants, long after actual plums had dropped out of it. It descends from the medieval and early modern pottages in which suet, breadcrumbs, dried fruit and spice were boiled together, and it acquired both its firm shape and its Christmas association once the pudding cloth and then the basin came into general use. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from the contributions of local housewives, prints it as an inherited English formula rather than an American invention, and the credit to Mrs. Collier of Bellefontaine is typical of the book's method: recipes gathered by name from women who had made them for years. The instruction that the puddings "will keep for months" points to the real reason for the scale here, a batch made well ahead and boiled again as needed through the winter.