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Plum Pudding
Beat together half cup sugar, two eggs and one tea-spoon butter, add three pints sweet milk, a little salt, six crackers rolled fine, one cup raisins, and a half sheet gelatine dissolved in a little water; season with nutmeg or cinnamon. Bake in a pudding-dish.-Mrs. Dr. Stall, Union City.
Despite the name, this is a baked cracker-and-raisin custard rather than a boiled suet pudding. Treat it as a custard and it behaves well; treat it as a cake and it curdles.
- The hinge: gentle heatSix cups of milk thickened by two eggs is a very loose custard, and it will curdle if driven hard. The recipe says only "bake in a pudding-dish"; a moderate oven of about 350F, with a water bath for insurance, is a modern reading rather than the book's instruction. It is done when the centre is just set and reads about 175F.
- Three pints sweet milkSix cups. "Sweet" here means fresh rather than sour or buttermilk, not sweetened. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes.
- Six crackersPlain soda or water crackers; period crackers ran larger than modern ones, so six may give something in the region of half to three-quarters of a cup of crumbs, and those crumbs are what carries the pudding. Unsalted-top saltines are the closest current stand-in.
- Half a sheet of gelatineGenuinely ambiguous. Nineteenth-century sheet gelatine came in large sheets far bigger than modern leaves, and strengths were not standardised. Roughly a teaspoon of powdered gelatine, softened in cold water and stirred into the warm milk, is a reasonable reading, but the pudding sets from the eggs regardless.
- One teaspoon butterTake it as written. This is a lean, thrifty pudding; the butter is there for flavour, not richness.
- RaisinsOrdinary dark raisins. Tossing them in a spoonful of the cracker crumbs keeps them from sinking to the bottom of so thin a batter.
- Timing and yieldThe mixture comes to nearly two quarts before baking, so use a dish of about three quarts; reckon on upwards of an hour, longer in a deep one. It serves eight to ten, warm or cold, and takes a hard sauce or a thin cream well.
"Plum" in English cookery has meant raisin since long before the plum pudding of Christmas became a boiled, suet-heavy, brandy-soaked institution, and American household books kept the older, looser sense of the word: a pudding with dried fruit in it earned the name. This one is a long way from the cannonball of a boiled pudding. It is a milk-and-cracker custard, the sort of dish that turned stale crackers and a handful of raisins into a family dessert, and it belongs to the same thrifty family as bread pudding and cracker pie. Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in 1877) was assembled from contributions by named women in named towns, which is why the attribution to Mrs. Dr. Stall of Union City sits at the end; the book's authority came from its neighbours rather than from a single author.