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Uxbridge Plum Pudding, Excellent
Shred half a pound of suet very finely, mix with it half a pound of flour, half a pound of sugar, half a pound of mashed potatoes, half a pound of grated carrots, three-quarters of a pound of picked and dried currants, two ounces of minced candied peel, and a little grated nutmeg. Mix the ingredients thoroughly. Press them into a buttered basin or mould which they will quite fill, cover the mould with a saucer, and tie it tightly in a cloth. Plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling quickly until done enough. A quarter of an hour before the pudding is wanted take it up, and before turning it out of the basin put it into the oven. This will remove any moisture it may have acquired in boiling, and cause it to turn out better. Send wine sauce to table with it. Time to boil the pudding, fully six hours. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
V
A frugal Victorian boiled pudding: no eggs, no milk, no brandy in the mix — the moisture comes entirely from mashed potato and grated carrot, which also do the work of binding. The proportions are all in half-pounds, so it scales cleanly.
- The hinge: never let it stop boilingA basin pudding sits in water for six hours and the pan will run dry long before that. Keep a kettle going and top up with boiling water only; cold water halts the cooking and can leave a heavy, sodden band through the middle.
- Weights in metricHalf a pound is 225 g, three-quarters of a pound of currants is 340 g, two ounces of peel is 55 g. Total raw weight is about 3" lb (roughly 1.5 kg), which wants a 1.5-litre (2" -pint) basin filled to the brim as directed.
- SuetFresh beef suet shredded from the kidney fat is what is meant. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, substitutes weight for weight; if using a solid block, freeze it and grate it coarsely rather than chopping.
- Potatoes and carrotsThe potatoes should be plainly boiled and mashed with nothing added — no butter, no milk — and cooled before mixing. The carrots are grated raw on the coarse side of the box grater.
- "Picked and dried" currantsNineteenth-century dried fruit arrived with stalks, grit and small stones, so it was picked over, washed and dried before use. Modern currants need only a glance for the odd stem.
- Covering the basinThe saucer-and-cloth method works, but a pleated round of baking parchment topped with pleated foil, tied under the rim with string and given a string handle, is easier to lift and just as watertight. Set the basin on a trivet or folded cloth so it does not sit directly on the pan base.
- The oven finishFifteen minutes in the oven, as directed, with the covering removed; the book gives no temperature, so a moderate oven — about 350°F / 180°C — is a reasonable modern reading. This dries the surface so the pudding releases cleanly and does not slump on the dish.
- Wine sauceThe period sauce is a sweetened white-wine custard or a simple sugar-and-wine sauce thickened with a little butter and flour. Brandy butter or a plain vanilla custard serves the same purpose.
- Yield and keepingSix to eight portions, as stated. With no eggs and no alcohol it does not keep like a Christmas pudding; eat within a few days, refrigerated, and steam slices to reheat. The "probable cost, 1s. 3d." is the book's own guide to household economy, not a modern figure.
Cassell's assembled its dictionary in the 1870s for households that counted pennies, and this pudding shows the arithmetic: potato and carrot stand in for a good part of the flour and all of the eggs and milk, while the currants and candied peel keep it tasting like a proper boiled pudding. Root-vegetable puddings were an established English shift long before this — carrot puddings appear in eighteenth-century receipt books, valued because the carrot's own sugar and moisture sweetened and lightened a mixture cheaply. The Uxbridge attribution is the sort of place-name a Victorian compiler attached to a version received from a correspondent or another book, and it is generally best read as a label rather than evidence that the recipe originated in that Middlesex town. The six-hour boil and the closed cloth belong to the era of the coal range, where a pot could sit at a rolling boil all afternoon so long as the fire was stoked and the water kept up.