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Christmas Plum Pudding (Take one and a half pounds)
Take one and a half pounds of bread-crumbs, half a pound of flour, two pounds of finely-shredded beef suet, two pounds of stoned raisins, two pounds of currants, washed, picked, and dried, two pounds of sugar, a quarter of a pound of candied lemon-and citron-peel, that is, two ounces of each, two small nutmegs grated, the juice of a lemon, and the rind finely chopped, a tea-spoonful of salt, two ounces of sweet almonds, blanched and sliced, sixteen eggs, a glass of brandy, and as much milk as will wet the mixture, but no more than that, as it makes the pudding heavy. It should be as stiff as paste. Mix all the dry ingredients thoroughly, then add the eggs and milk, and, last of all, the brandy. Boil it, and keep boiling for ten hours. Sufficient for a large family pudding (big enough for fourteen or sixteen persons) or four or five small ones. Probable cost, 6s. 6d.
A full Victorian household pudding: roughly twelve pounds of mixture before the eggs go in. Read the yield note first and decide how much you actually want to make.
- Scale it downAs written this fills one enormous cloth or four to five one-quart basins, and serves fourteen to sixteen. Quartering the whole list gives a single 1-quart basin for four to six; the proportions divide cleanly.
- SuetTwo pounds of beef suet means raw kidney suet, shredded or grated fine, not the boxed shredded suet sold today — though packet suet (beef or vegetable) works and needs no preparation. Chill it hard before shredding, or it smears.
- The hinge: keep it stiffThe instruction to add only as much milk as will wet the mixture is the one that matters. There is no leavening here at all — lift comes from eggs and steam, and a slack batter simply sets dense and wet. It should hold a spoon upright.
- Boiling versus steamingThe recipe says only to boil it, for ten hours, which implies a cloth or basin submerged in a large pot of water. In a modern kitchen, fill greased basins two-thirds full, cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down, and steam in a covered pan with water halfway up the sides. A quart basin wants about six hours; a pudding of the full size does want the long boil the recipe gives. Top up with boiling water so the pan never runs dry.
- Stoned raisinsStoning meant removing the pits by hand; modern raisins come seedless. \
- NutmegTwo small whole nutmegs, freshly grated, is somewhere around three to four teaspoons for the full quantity — assertive but not unusual for the period. Grate it at the last moment.
- Serving and keepingCool completely, re-cover with fresh parchment and store somewhere cool and dark; the pudding improves for weeks and is traditionally fed with a little more brandy. Steam for one to two hours to reheat before serving, depending on size.
- Cost note6s 6d is the ingredient cost as printed, so a cook could price the dish against the household budget. It has no bearing on the method.
Plum pudding kept the name long after the plums disappeared: "plum" meant any dried fruit in early modern English, and the dish descends from the spiced, suet-thickened meat pottages and "plum porridge" served at the start of a festive meal in the seventeenth century. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the broth was dropped, the breadcrumbs and eggs bound it into something that could be tied in a cloth and boiled, and it migrated to the end of dinner. By the time Cassell's was compiled the pudding had become fixed Christmas ritual, helped along by Dickens and by cheap sugar and dried fruit arriving through the ports — hence the extravagant fruit-to-flour ratio here. The vast quantity and the note on probable cost show the book's purpose: it was written for cooks in households where the mixture ran to four or five small puddings at a time.