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French Plum Pudding
Put half a pound of flour into a basin with about a salt-spoonful of salt; beat up separately four yolks and two whites of eggs; stir the yolks, with half a pint of cream, into the flour. Boil one pound of good French plums; put boiling water on them, and continue to simmer till the stones will come out easily. Remove the stones; drain off the moisture from the fruit, and stir it and also the frothed whites of eggs, into the batter. Do not boil in a basin; the pudding is best in a floured cloth, which should not be tied too closely, as the contents will swell in boiling. Time, two hours to boil. Probable cost, 2s. 2d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain boiled batter pudding studded with stewed prunes, from the era when a cloth pudding was weekly work. The batter is unsweetened and unleavened, so texture depends almost entirely on how the cloth is tied.
- The hinge: tie the cloth looselyThe flour-and-egg batter swells considerably as it cooks, and a tightly tied cloth gives a dense, sodden centre. Leave a good inch or two of slack, and lower the bundle into water already at a rolling boil so the flour paste sets a skin at once.
- French plumsThese are prunes — dried plums, the better sorts imported from France, and sold whole with the stones in. Use whole pitted prunes if that is what you have and skip the stoning step; the pre-simmering to soften them is still worth doing.
- Half a pint of creamAn imperial half-pint is 10 imperial fl oz, about 285 ml, or a little under 1¼ US cups. Single (light) cream or half-and-half is probably closer to Victorian "cream" than modern heavy whipping cream, which will make the batter greasy.
- Half a pound of flourAbout 1¾ cups of plain flour, measured by weight if possible. There is no raising agent at all, so the two frothed whites are the only lift the pudding gets — fold them in last and do not beat them out.
- No sugarThe recipe sweetens nothing; the prunes carry it. It was most likely eaten with a sweet sauce, custard, or sifted sugar at table, so plan on serving one of those rather than adding sugar to the batter, which will slacken it.
- Preparing the clothScald a close-woven cotton or linen cloth, wring it out, and flour the inside generously while damp. Dry flour on a dry cloth will not form the protective paste that keeps water out of the pudding.
- Two hours of boilingThat is accurate for a pudding this size. Keep the water at a steady boil the whole time and top it up with boiling water from a kettle; a lull in the boil, or cold water added, gives a heavy streak through the middle.
- Turning out and yieldLift the pudding, dip it briefly in cold water to loosen the cloth, then unwrap onto a warm dish and let it stand a minute before slicing. Serves four to five, as stated. The "2s. 2d." is late-Victorian retail cost and has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
"French plums" in nineteenth-century British cookery books generally means prunes — dried plums imported from France, sold whole with the stone in and treated as a luxury dried fruit rather than a stewing staple. Boiled puddings of this kind were a mainstay of the English kitchen for well over two centuries, and the "French" here does no more than label the fruit; there is nothing especially French about the method. Its disappearance has less to do with taste than with equipment — a household with an oven and a mixer has little reason to keep a pudding cloth and a stockpot boiling for two hours.