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Grandmother Cole's English Plum Pudding
One pound of raisins after they are stoned, one pound of currants, one pound of sugar, one pound of beef lard chopped fine, one pound of flour, eight eggs, one large glass of brandy, one large glass of wine, one-half ounce of ground mace, one-half ounce of ground nutmeg, one-half pound of citron, add candied lemon or orange peel. Use sufficient milk to make it of a proper consistency (that is, a thick batter), one teaspoon of salt; flour well the bag, leaving room for the pudding to swell a little, and tie the string very tight; boil seven or eight hours. Salt the water.
Sauce-Make a thin drawn butter, add sugar, brandy, wine and
— Mrs. Theodore A. Cole
nutmeg.
A full-sized Victorian boiled pudding: about five pounds of batter cooked in a floured cloth for most of a day. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the quantities and vessels need translating before you start.
- The hinge: the cloth and the waterThe pudding is boiled in a floured cloth, not a basin, and the water must never stop simmering or drop below the level of the pudding. Top up from a kettle of boiling water; cold water added mid-boil will make the outside heavy and gummy. Rest the tied bundle on an inverted plate or a rack so it does not sit on the pan bottom and scorch.
- Flouring the bagScald the cloth, wring it out, and dust the damp inside surface generously with flour. That flour paste is what seals the surface and keeps water out of the batter. Tie the string very tight at the neck, as directed, but leave the slack the recipe asks for so the pudding can swell.
- "Beef lard chopped fine"This means beef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, chopped or grated fine rather than rendered. Rendered lard will not work the same way; suet melts slowly during the long boil and leaves the crumb open. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet.
- "One large glass" of brandy and wineGenuinely ambiguous. A wineglass in period cookbooks is usually reckoned at 2 fluid ounces, so a "large glass" plausibly means 3 to 4 ounces of each. Start at the low end; the batter should be a thick batter, and you can adjust with the milk.
- The spicing is enormousThe spicing is heavy -- half an ounce each of ground mace and nutmeg is roughly two to three tablespoons apiece, more than most modern palates will want. A teaspoon or two of each is closer to current practice; period ground spice was also liable to be stale or adulterated.
- Currants and raisins"Currants" are dried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. "Raisins after they are stoned" means you weigh them after pitting; modern seedless raisins can be weighed straight from the box.
- Drawn butter sauceDrawn butter in this period is butter thickened with a little flour and hot water or milk into a thin sauce, not simply melted butter. Make it thin, as the recipe says, then sweeten and add the brandy, wine and nutmeg off the heat.
- Yield and keepingThe ingredients come to well over five pounds, nearer seven once the eggs, citron and liquids are counted, enough for a dozen or more servings. It improves after a week or more wrapped and stored cool, and is normally reheated by steaming or boiling for an hour before serving.
Boiled plum puddings of this kind descend from the older English plum pottage, a spiced meat-and-fruit broth thickened with bread, which by the eighteenth century had shed its meat and stiffened into a suet pudding boiled in a cloth. "Plum" is a survival of the earlier English use of the word for any dried fruit; there are no plums in it. Puddings this large kept well: one long boil yielded something that could be stored for weeks and revived by steaming. That it appears under a grandmother's name, with brandy and wine and a half-pound of citron, marks it as a family showpiece in an American household still cooking in the English manner.