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Christmas Pudding
Take three-quarters of a pound each of chopped suet, stoned raisins, currants, sugar and dried bread crumbs, one-quarter of a pound of sliced citron, two chopped sour apples and the grated peel of one lemon. Mix together with one-half teaspoon each of cloves and, salt. Add six eggs and one gill of rum or brandy. Steam for four hours in two buttered molds. Turn out on a hot dish, sprinkle sugar over the pudding, garnish with a sprig of holly, pour one-half cup of warm brandy over it and set it on fire as it goes to the table. Serve with
A classic steamed suet pudding, unusually plain in its spicing — cloves and lemon peel only, no cinnamon or nutmeg. The recipe breaks off mid-sentence at the sauce, so you will need to choose your own.
- The hinge: steady, gentle steamThe mold must sit above simmering water, covered, with the water topped up from a kettle so it never goes off the boil and never boils dry. Four hours of hard rolling boil will force water past the cover and leave the pudding sodden.
- A gillFour fluid ounces, half a cup. The editor's note above says as much, but note that this is the American gill; an imperial gill is five fluid ounces.
- SuetAsk a butcher for beef kidney suet and chop or grate it while very cold, or buy it shredded in a box. Vegetable suet works. Butter does not substitute cleanly — it melts too early and the crumb turns dense.
- Dried bread crumbsStale bread dried in a low oven and rubbed fine, not the sandy commercial crumb sold for coating. There is no flour in this pudding at all, so the crumb is the only structure it has besides egg.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold around Christmas or from baking suppliers. Candied orange and lemon peel is a fair stand-in; skip the neon-green glacé cherries sold in the same aisle.
- Sour applesA tart cooking apple — Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy. Peel and core before chopping.
- Molds and yieldTwo buttered pudding basins or coffee cans, filled about two-thirds and covered with buttered parchment and foil tied down. The weighed ingredients alone come to four pounds, and with the eggs, apples and spirit the mixture is closer to five and a half pounds, so allow well over a quart in each mold. It serves twelve to sixteen in small wedges — this is rich.
- The flaming brandyWarm the half cup of brandy just to blood heat before lighting; cold spirit will not catch. Light it away from anything overhead, and never pour from the bottle into a lit dish.
- The missing sauceThe text stops at "Serve with." The period standard was hard sauce — creamed butter and powdered sugar with brandy beaten in — or a thin foamy egg sauce. Either suits it.
- KeepingPuddings of this type were made weeks ahead, stored cool and wrapped, then re-steamed an hour or two to serve. If you keep it, keep it refrigerated; modern kitchens are warmer than the larders it was designed for.
The boiled or steamed suet pudding is the English Christmas dish that came to American cookbooks whole, and by the time this version was printed its shape was fixed: dried fruit, suet, crumbs, spirit, hours of steam, and a flame at the table. The plum pudding's ancestor is generally traced to spiced meat-and-fruit pottages of the late medieval kitchen, which gradually shed the meat and kept the suet; "plum" is the old word for raisin, which is why plum puddings contain none. What makes this particular version interesting is what it leaves out — no flour, no nutmeg, no molasses, no long list of mixed peels — leaning instead on lemon peel, cloves and two tart apples for lift. The half cup of brandy set alight was already understood as obligatory theatre rather than seasoning, and the sprig of holly is a reminder that this was a dish assembled to be carried into a darkened dining room.