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Plum Pudding, Without Eggs
Shred finely four ounces of beef suet; add a pinch of salt, a table-spoonful of flour, half a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs, six ounces of currants, picked and dried, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, half a nutmeg, grated, and a little candied peel. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, then stir into the mixture as much milk as will make a stiff batter. A table-spoonful of brandy may be added or not. Tie the pudding in a cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and let it boil quickly until done enough. This pudding may, if liked, be baked instead of being boiled. Time to boil, four hours. Probable cost, 7d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain Victorian boiled pudding that leans on breadcrumbs and suet rather than eggs for body. Nothing here is difficult, but the cloth and the four-hour boil need a little management.
- The hinge: keep the water boilingA cloth pudding dropped into water that is merely simmering, or allowed to go off the boil, absorbs water and turns sodden. Keep it at a steady rolling boil the whole time and top up from a kettle of boiling water, never cold.
- SuetFresh beef suet from a butcher needs the membrane stripped off before shredding; 4 oz of packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) works directly. Keep it cold so it stays in distinct flakes rather than smearing into the crumbs.
- No eggs means a stiff batterWith no egg to set, the breadcrumbs and flour do all the binding. Aim for a mixture that just holds its shape on the spoon, not a pourable one; too much milk and the pudding will be heavy and wet in the middle.
- The clothScald a square of unbleached cotton or calico, wring it out, and flour the inside surface generously before filling. Tie loosely enough to allow some swelling, and if you can, suspend the pudding on a plate or trivet so it does not sit on the pan base.
- Half a nutmegThat is roughly 1 to 1.5 teaspoons freshly grated, which is assertive by modern taste. Halving it will give a milder result alongside the currants and peel.
- Candied peel"A little" is probably about 1 oz, chopped small. If you can get whole candied citron or orange peel and cut it yourself, it will hold its shape better than ready-chopped mixed peel.
- If you bake it insteadThe book gives no temperature. Butter a deep dish, cover it, and bake at 325°F (165°C) for about 1.5 to 2 hours until set and firm to the touch. Baked, it comes out drier and darker at the edges, more like a pudding-cake.
- Yield and servingFour or five portions, as stated. Serve hot with a sweet white sauce, custard or brandy butter; "probable cost, 7d" is the pre-decimal price and marks this as one of the book's economical puddings.
Cassell's includes this among its puddings, which shows how flexible the term "plum pudding" had become by the late nineteenth century. The rich, egg-and-brandy Christmas version fed on dried fruit and long steaming, but the same name attached to far humbler mixtures like this one, where breadcrumbs and suet do the work of eggs and currants stand in for the "plums" (a word that in English cookery long meant raisins and currants generally, not the fresh stone fruit). Egg-free recipes were common in period books, and it is often suggested that this owed less to dietary preference than to the fact that eggs were seasonal and dear, so that a household wanting a boiled pudding in February simply left them out. The cloth-boiled pudding itself is generally traced to the seventeenth century, when the pudding cloth freed cooks from stuffing mixtures into animal guts and made a sweet boiled pudding a routine possibility.