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Plum Porridge or Broth
Plum porridge was a favourite dish two hundred years ago, but it is now almost obsolete. as it has been superseded by plum pudding. The following is a recipe of Queen Anne's time. Take ten pounds of the shin of beef, and two pounds of the neck, and boil these in three gallons of water for five hours. Strain the liquor, and skim carefully. Put it back into the saucepan, with three pounds of stoned raisins, three pounds of stewed prunes, and two pounds of currants, and let the fruit boil gently for an hour. Take the crumb of a twopenny loaf, dip it into the liquid, and beat it smoothly with a fork. Mix with it the pulped prunes, an ounce of powdered cinnamon, a quarter of an ounce of powdered cloves, half an ounce of grated nutmeg, and a quarter of an ounce of powdered mace. Put this mixture into the soup to thicken it, and boil for a quarter of an hour, stirring all the time to keep the soup from burning. Add sufficient sugar to suit the taste, a little salt, a quart of claret, and half a pint of sack. Cut some white bread into dice. Lay them in a soup tureen, put a piece of the meat over them, pour in the broth, and serve.
This is a Christmas dish built on a feast-day scale: twelve pounds of beef and three gallons of water. Anyone cooking it now should divide the whole thing by four or six before starting.
- YieldAs written this needs a pot well over 12 litres — three gallons is about 13½ litres of water before the meat and fruit go in — and would serve thirty or more. A quarter batch — 2 lb 8 oz shin, 8 oz neck, 3 quarts water — fits an ordinary large pot and still gives eight generous servings.
- SackSack was the fortified white wine of Spain and the Canaries, the ancestor of sherry. A dry or medium amontillado is the closest thing on a modern shelf. Claret means red Bordeaux, or any dry, fairly tannic red.
- A twopenny loafA white household loaf whose weight varied with the price of grain under the assize of bread, so no fixed modern equivalent; take the crumb of a small white loaf, which at around 6 oz gives roughly 3 cups of soft fresh breadcrumbs. Stale white bread torn and soaked works as well as beating it with a fork.
- The spices are not a misprintTwo ounces of ground spice in total, dominated by an ounce of cinnamon, is in keeping with period practice and with the volume of liquid. Scaled down it comes to about a tablespoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon or so each of the others, which is still assertive.
- Stewed prunesThe recipe assumes the prunes have already been stewed and will be pulped, stones removed, before they go into the bread mixture. Buy pitted prunes and simmer them in a little water until collapsing; the pulp is what thickens the broth along with the crumb.
- The last quarter hourOnce the bread and fruit pulp go in, the porridge catches on the bottom very quickly. Use a heavy pan, the lowest heat that keeps it moving, and a flat-edged wooden spoon; scorched crumb will flavour the whole pot and cannot be rescued.
- Skim twiceShin and neck give a fatty broth, and fat sitting on top of a sweet spiced soup is unpleasant. Chilling the strained liquor overnight and lifting off the set cap is far more effective than skimming hot.
- Wine at the endThe claret and sack go in after the thickening, off a hard boil, so the aromatics survive. Add the sugar last and taste as you go — with three pounds of raisins and two of currants the fruit does much of the work.
Plum porridge was the Christmas dish of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, and "plum" here means dried fruit — raisins, currants, prunes — rather than the fresh stone fruit. It is conventionally placed on the direct line between medieval spiced meat pottages and the plum pudding that displaced it: on the usual account, as cooks bound the fruit and spice mixture more and more stiffly and boiled it in a cloth, the broth thinned out of fashion and the pudding took over the table. Cassell's flags it as "almost obsolete" and prints it as a curiosity of Queen Anne's reign, which is roughly the right period for the surviving versions in printed cookery books, and the meat-with-sweet-fruit combination is what makes it read so strangely now. The bread-dice in the tureen and the lump of shin laid over them are a reminder that this was a soup course meant to be filling first and refined second.