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Plum Pudding, Baked
Shred finely half a pound of beef suet, mix with it a salt-spoonful of salt, a pound of flour, a heaped tea-spoonful of baking-powder, half a pound of picked and dried currants, half a pound of stoned raisins, one ounce of candied peel cut into thin strips, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and a little grated nutmeg. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly. Moisten them with an egg beaten up with as much milk as will make a thick batter. Pour this into a buttered dish, and bake in a well-heated oven. Turn the pudding out before serving, and strew powdered sugar thickly over it before sending it table. For a plain pudding, the egg and half the fruit may be omitted. Time to bake, from an hour and a half to two hours. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A batter pudding rather than the dense boiled Christmas kind — quick to assemble, and it lives or dies on the consistency of the mixture. Keep the batter thick enough to hold the fruit in suspension.
- The hinge: batter thicknessAdd the milk gradually and stop while the mixture still falls from the spoon in a heavy lump. A slack batter lets the currants and raisins sink to the bottom, and the pudding will not turn out cleanly.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no temperature; "a well-heated oven" is a relative direction. In a modern oven around 350F/180C suits a pudding of this depth — much hotter and the surface sets and colours before the centre is cooked through; cover loosely with foil if it browns early.
- Small measuresA salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon. Two tablespoonfuls of sugar is modest for a pound of flour — the bulk of the sweetness comes from the dried fruit and the thick dusting of sugar at the end.
- SuetPacket shredded suet substitutes directly for hand-shredded beef suet. If using fresh suet from a butcher, freeze it for half an hour and grate it, then toss it in a little of the flour so it does not clump.
- Fruit preparation"Picked and dried" currants means going through them for stems and grit, then rinsing and drying — modern packaged currants generally need none of this. "Stoned raisins" means raisins with the stones removed by hand; seedless raisins are the modern equivalent and what you will buy anyway.
- Candied peelAn ounce is roughly 30 g. Buy peel in whole caps or large pieces and cut your own strips; the pre-diced kind is drier and disappears into the crumb.
- Dish and turning outUse a well-buttered 1.5 to 2 quart baking dish or deep cake tin. Let the pudding stand five to ten minutes before inverting, or the hot centre will tear.
- Time and yieldAn hour and a half is enough for most dishes of this size; test with a skewer at the centre. It serves five or six warm, with cream or a sweet sauce.
The "plum" in plum pudding is the older English sense of the word, meaning any dried fruit — raisins and currants rather than plums, a usage that by the Victorian period survived mainly in compounds and in ordinary speech. The famous version is boiled for hours in a floured cloth or basin, and this baked recipe is the economical household alternative: no copper of water on the boil all afternoon, no cloth to scald and dry, and a result closer to a fruited batter pudding than to the dark steamed Christmas article. The final line — that the egg and half the fruit may be left out for a plain pudding — gives one framework and then shows how to stretch it down to a cheaper table. The costing in shillings and pence, 1s. 4d. for five or six people, speaks to mistresses who had to check their cook's spending.