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English Plum Pudding
One pound each of bread-crumbs, flour, suet, currants, and raisins; one-half pound each of almonds, candied citron, and sugar; one short pint West Indian molasses (New Orleans); one orange grated; eight eggs; one nutmeg grated; one teaspoon each of salt, cloves, ginger, and allspice. Prepare raisins and currants, then dredge with flour and mix with the chopped citron and blanched almonds. Mix the suet with the flour, crumbs, sugar, salt, spices, and orange peel, adding next the eggs, milk, and fruit. Scald and dredge a large, strong pudding-cloth and lay on it the pudding; tie well and daub the stringhole with dough. The pudding must be placed in boiling water and boil eight hours, but it may be boiled six or seven hours some days before needed and finished the day it is served.
A full-size boiled Christmas pudding of the old type, weighing in at close to six pounds of batter before it goes into the cloth. Two things in the text need settling before you start: the milk and the cloth.
- The missing milkMilk appears in the mixing instructions but never in the ingredient list. Judge it by feel — enough to bring the mass to a heavy, barely droppable batter, roughly a cup, added last and slowly. This is a genuine gap in the original, not a quantity we can supply for you.
- A short pint of molassesA pint is 2 cups; "short" means a little under, so call it 1 3/4 cups. The parenthesis appears to offer New Orleans molasses as the equivalent or substitute for West Indian; the recipe says nothing more about how the two differed. Do not substitute blackstrap, which is bitter at this volume.
- SuetBeef kidney suet, grated or finely chopped and kept cold. Butchers will still order it. Frozen shredded suet works; vegetable suet gives a lighter, less rich pudding. One pound is correct for this much flour and crumb — it is what keeps the pudding moist through eight hours of boiling.
- Candied citronThe candied peel of the citron fruit, sold in blocks at Christmas and increasingly hard to find. Candied orange and lemon peel together is the usual stand-in, chopped fine.
- The clothScalding and flouring the cloth is what forms the skin that holds the pudding together — skip it and the pudding leaks into the water. Tie loosely enough to allow about an inch of swelling, and plug the hole where the string gathers with a knob of dough, exactly as written. Well-greased and floured pudding basins with pleated foil lids, of a combined capacity large enough for the whole batter and set on a trivet in a covered pot, are the modern equivalent and far easier to manage.
- Boiling water, kept boilingThe pudding goes into water already at a rolling boil and must stay covered by it the whole time. Top up from a kettle of boiling water, never cold, or the pudding turns heavy where the temperature dropped.
- Boil now, finish laterThe suggestion at the end is the traditional practice and worth following: boil six or seven hours some days ahead, as the recipe says, cool completely in the cloth, keep it wrapped in a cool dry place, then boil it again on the day it is served.
- YieldThis makes one very large pudding — the ingredients alone run to eight or nine pounds — serving twenty or more in the thin slices such a pudding is meant to be cut into. It halves cleanly if that is more than you want.
The recipe sits in a chapter on the grape because the pound of raisins and pound of currants that dominate it are both dried grapes — currants here are the small black Zante or Corinth grape, not the fresh berry of the same name, and the word is a worn-down form of "Corinth." A pudding of this kind is the descendant of much older savory boiled puddings and pottages thickened with suet, bread and dried fruit; the plums in the name are dried plums in the older sense, meaning raisins and prunes generally rather than the fruit we now call a plum. The move from a loose pottage to a solid mass boiled in a floured cloth is generally traced to the seventeenth century, and it is that cloth, plus the large proportion of suet and sugar, that let a household boil a pudding well ahead and serve it at Christmas.