Plum Duff
Mix with a sweet soft biscuit dough chopped plums (fresh or dried), using one quart of plums to each pint of flour, and tie up in a well-dredged pudding cloth, boiling hard three hours. A simple stiff batter pudding (see Introductory Recipes) may be used with the fruit instead. IOI
A cloth-boiled pudding written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew how to tie one. The proportions are generous with fruit and thin on instruction, so most of the work is in the technique the original leaves unsaid.
- The hinge: the water must never stop boilingA cloth pudding that is allowed to fall to a simmer takes on water and turns sodden and grey. Keep it at a hard boil for the full three hours and top up with boiling water from a kettle, never cold.
- Dredging the cloth"Well-dredged" means the cloth is dusted heavily with flour; the usual practice was to scald it in boiling water and wring it out first, so the wet flour sets into a skin that keeps the dough from absorbing water. Leave slack when you tie it — the pudding will swell as it cooks.
- Sweet soft biscuit doughAmerican biscuit dough of the period: flour, a chemical leavener, a little sugar, fat rubbed in, and milk to a soft drop consistency. Not a British tea biscuit and not a rich cake batter.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume here. A pint is 2 cups, roughly 8–9 oz. A quart of chopped plums to that is about 4 cups of fruit — a very high ratio, and the pudding will be dense and wet rather than cakey.
- Fresh versus dried plumsDried plums are prunes; they need soaking and will make a much sweeter, darker pudding. Fresh plums throw a lot of juice, so stone them, chop them and drain briefly or the dough will slacken past the point where it holds together in the cloth.
- The batter alternativeThe "stiff batter pudding" cross-reference points to another page in the same book. A pouring batter will not work in a cloth — it needs to be stiff enough to hold a shape when the cloth is gathered and tied.
- UnmouldingLift the pudding out, dip it for a few seconds in cold water to loosen the skin, then untie and turn it onto a warm dish. Let it stand a minute before cutting or it will slump.
- Yield and servingThis quantity should serve roughly six. Duff is usually served hot with a sweet sauce — hard sauce, a thin custard, or simply cream and sugar.
"Duff" is a northern English and Scots dialect pronunciation of "dough," and plum duff belongs to the long family of British boiled puddings made in a cloth rather than a basin — a method that predates the widespread domestic oven and asks nothing more than a pot of water. It became firmly associated with ships: a boiled dough pudding studded with dried fruit could be made from flour, fat and prunes that all kept for months at sea, and duff day is often said to have been a fixture of the naval and merchant service week. As with mincemeat and plum pudding, "plum" in the traditional name usually meant raisins or prunes rather than fresh fruit — which is why the specification "fresh or dried" is worth noticing.