Home › The Principles of Cookery › Plum Pudding, Plain
Plum Pudding, Plain
Shred six ounces of suet very finely, add a pound of flour, a quarter of a pound of currants, a quarter of a pound of raisins, half a tea-spoonful of salt, and a tea-spoonful of baking-powder. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, and stir into them three-quarters of a pint of milk in which has been dissolved three table-spoonfuls of treacle. Tie the pudding in a cloth, and boil it until done enough. A little spice and sugar may be added if liked. Time to boil, three hours. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain boiled pudding of the everyday sort — no eggs, no brandy, no breadcrumbs, just flour, suet and enough dried fruit to justify the name. It behaves like a dense steamed dumpling, and the main thing that goes wrong is water.
- Keep the water at a rolling boil and topped upThe pudding must be lowered into water already boiling and never allowed to stop. Add boiling water from a kettle as the level drops; cold water from the tap will chill the pot and give you a heavy, sodden centre.
- TreacleBlack treacle is the British equivalent of dark molasses. Use unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter enough to dominate a pudding this plain. Golden syrup will work but gives a much milder, paler result.
- SuetShredded beef suet, sold boxed and floured in the UK, or fresh kidney suet grated while very cold. Vegetable suet is a straight substitution. Six ounces to a pound of flour is a lean ratio by pudding standards, which is what makes this the plain version.
- The clothScald the cloth, wring it out, flour the inside generously and tie it with room for the pudding to swell — about an inch of slack, gathered and tied tight at the neck. Untied or under-floured cloths let water in and the outside turns to paste.
- A basin insteadIf you would rather not wrestle a cloth, use a large pudding basin of at least 2 litres (3½ pints), greased, covered with pleated parchment and foil, tied down, and stand it on a trivet in water reaching halfway up. Allow about the same three hours.
- "Until done enough"Three hours is the figure given and it is right for this quantity. Test with a skewer to the centre: it should come out clean and hot to the back of the hand.
- MeasuresThree-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz in imperial, about 425 ml; a US cook should use a little over 1¾ cups. A tablespoon of treacle here is a generous, rounded spoonful.
- Spice and sugarIf adding, a teaspoon of mixed spice and 2 oz of sugar suit this quantity. Without them the pudding is genuinely plain and wants a sweet sauce, custard or brown sugar and butter.
- YieldFive or six as stated, and it reheats well — steam slices for 20 minutes or fry them in butter the next day.
This is the workaday end of a family that peaks at Christmas. A "plum pudding" takes its name from the older English use of plum for any dried fruit, raisins especially, a usage already fading by the time Cassell's was compiled but fossilised in the dish's name. The rich version — eggs, breadcrumbs, brandy, a pound of fruit, boiled half a day and hung to mature — belonged to the feast; this one, flour-heavy, eggless and leavened with baking powder rather than long boiling alone, belonged to Tuesday. The costing tells the story: ninepence to feed six was cheap, and boiled puddings of this kind were how a British household turned flour and fat into a filling second course without heating an oven. Cassell's habitually gave both grades of a dish, and the plain variant is the one recorded here.