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Plum Pudding
4 cups currants 4 cups raisins 4 cups sugar No. 2 1 cup molasses 1 pound chopped suet 1 pound chopped apples 3 cups sour milk 3 teaspoons soda Spices to taste Five Roses flour to stiffen.
Pack in a crock.
This is a farmhouse-scale batter rather than a single pudding: the quantities make something on the order of eight to ten pounds, and the last line assumes you will keep the mixture in a crock and boil off portions as wanted. Read it as a formula, halve or quarter it, and supply the cooking method the book leaves out.
- The missing instructionNothing here tells you to cook it. Fill greased pudding basins or moulds two-thirds full, cover with pleated parchment and foil or a floured cloth tied down, and boil or steam with the water halfway up the mould. A one-quart pudding needs about 3 hours; a two-quart, 4 to 5. Top up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- "Pack in a crock"The line appears to assume the raw batter will be kept in a cool cellar crock and cooked off in portions as wanted. With raw suet and soured milk in it, that is not a modern option. Refrigerate what you are not cooking and use it within two or three days, or steam the whole batch and store the cooked puddings instead, which keep far better.
- Sugar No. 2A grade designation rather than a measurement: it appears to have meant a soft yellow, less refined sugar rather than white. Light brown sugar, lightly packed, is the closest substitute.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered raw milk; buttermilk is the standard stand-in. Three teaspoons of soda for 3 cups is generous, and the soda must go in at the end, just before the flour, or the lift is spent before the pudding reaches the pot.
- "Flour to stiffen"Genuinely ambiguous, and the amount depends on how juicy the apples are. Expect somewhere in the range of 6 to 8 cups for the full batch, worked in until the batter is stiff enough to hold its shape on the spoon rather than pour. Five Roses was a hard-wheat bread flour; all-purpose is fine for a pudding.
- SuetBeef kidney fat, sold by butchers on request and available shredded in some shops. Chop or grate it cold and toss it with a little of the flour so it stays in distinct flakes. Frozen grated butter will work, though the crumb comes out shorter and less springy.
- Spices to tasteFor this volume of fruit, a workable starting point is 2 tablespoons cinnamon, 2 teaspoons each nutmeg and allspice, and 1 teaspoon cloves, plus a good teaspoon of salt, which the recipe omits entirely.
- Currants and raisinsOlder dried fruit needed picking over for stems and grit; modern packaged fruit does not. If it is very dry, plump it in hot water or spirits and drain well, or it will pull moisture out of the batter.
- Yield and servingThe full quantity feeds twenty-five or more. Serve hot with hard sauce, a brown sugar sauce or thin cream. Cooked puddings reheat by steaming for 45 minutes to an hour.
Plum pudding kept a name it had outgrown: "plums" meant raisins and other dried fruit in English usage from the seventeenth century onward, and by the Victorian period the boiled Christmas pudding contained no fresh plums at all. What is often said to mark this version as North American rather than English is the sour milk and soda in place of the eggs and long-hoarded brandy of the English tradition — and the instruction to pack it in a crock, which belongs to a farm kitchen with a cool cellar, standing suet, and a household that wanted pudding on the table more than once a year. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, whose Five Roses flour was milled from Canadian hard wheat; the book collected recipes contributed by customers, which explains the telegraphic style and the assumption that any reader already knew how to boil a pudding.