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Cottage Plum Pudding
Shred very finely three ounces of best beef suet; add three ounces of flour, one tea-spoonful of baking-powder, three ounces of bread-crumbs, two ounces of raisins, two ounces of currants, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, half a nutmeg grated, a tea-spoonful of chopped lemon-rind, and two well-beaten eggs. Tie the mixture in a floured cloth, and boil it for from two hours and a half to three hours. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for a small family.
A plain boiled pudding of the cheap sort, held together by suet and breadcrumbs rather than by richness. The main decisions the original leaves to you are the liquid and the vessel.
- MoistureTwo eggs are the only liquid given, which produces a very stiff mixture that will cook dense. A few tablespoons of milk, added until the batter drops heavily from the spoon, is consistent with period practice for cottage puddings and gives a lighter result.
- The clothA pudding cloth is scalded, wrung out, dusted generously with flour, then filled and tied leaving room for expansion. The floured surface sets into a skin that keeps water out; a dry or unfloured cloth lets the pudding waterlog. A greased 1.5-pint pudding basin with pleated foil and a lid of parchment does the same job with less anxiety.
- BoilingThe water must be at a full boil before the pudding goes in and must never stop simmering, or the pudding sinks and turns sodden. Top up with boiling water, never cold, across the two and a half to three hours.
- SuetFresh beef suet shredded from the kidney fat is what is meant. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works at the same weight; if using a block, freeze it and grate it coarsely rather than chopping.
- Baking powderCassell's is writing in an era when chemical raising agents were in domestic use. A level teaspoon of modern baking powder is plenty for 3 oz of flour.
- NutmegHalf a whole nutmeg grated is roughly a rounded teaspoon and is assertive against only 4 oz of dried fruit. Half that is closer to modern taste.
- Weights and yieldOunces convert at 28 g: 3 oz is about 85 g. The whole thing comes to a pudding of a little over a pound, which serves four modestly, five at a stretch.
- ServingTurn it out hot and serve with a sweet sauce, custard, or simply brown sugar and cream. It reheats well by steaming for 30 minutes.
"Cottage" in a Victorian cookery book is a price signal rather than a place: it marks the frugal version of a dish, here a plum pudding stripped of the brandy, candied peel, mixed spice and long maturing that the Christmas pudding demanded. Note that it contains no plums, and never did "plum" in English cookery had meant raisins and dried fruit generally since the seventeenth century, long before the pudding took its familiar boiled form. The breadcrumbs standing in for half the flour, the modest 4 oz of fruit, and the eggs doing the work that ale or milk might otherwise do all point to a household counting pennies. Puddings boiled in a floured cloth were the ordinary sweet of the English working table well into the twentieth century, cooked in the same pot as the meat when the range would only take one fire.