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English Plum Pudding
Six ounces of fine bread crumbs, two ounces each of lemon, orange and citron peel cut into fine shreds, one-half ounce of mixed spices (cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg), one-fourth pound of chopped apples, one-half teaspoon of minced lemon rind, one-half pound of sugar, three-fourths pound of chopped and seeded raisins, three-fourths pound of currants, one pound of flour, one pound of finely shredded suet. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, then add six eggs and a little milk if needed. This should make a stiff batter. Boil in a pudding basin or mold. Time, five or six hours. -Mrs Jay B. Kline.
A plain Victorian-style boiled pudding, given by weight as English recipes of the period were. Nothing here is difficult, but the vessel and the water level matter more than anything else.
- The hinge: keep the water boiling and topped upThe pudding cooks by surrounding steam for five to six hours. Set the covered basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, keep it at a steady simmer, and add more boiling water every hour. If the pot runs dry the basin scorches and the pudding is ruined; cold water added to a hot basin can crack it.
- Covering the basinGrease the basin, fill it no more than two-thirds full, then cover with a pleated round of parchment and a layer of foil, tied under the rim with string. The pleat gives the pudding room to rise and the seal keeps water out. A cloth tied over the top does the same job and was the usual period method, though the recipe itself does not say how to cover the basin.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, is what gives the pudding its texture; ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Its high melting point is the point, so it holds shape while the flour sets. Butter will make an edible pudding but a denser, cakier one.
- Candied peel and currants"Lemon, orange and citron peel" means candied peel, not fresh zest, and the half teaspoon of minced lemon rind is the fresh zest, separately. Currants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Modern raisins come seedless, so ignore the seeding.
- Mixed spicesHalf an ounce is roughly six teaspoons total of ground cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg combined. Weight it toward cinnamon and nutmeg; two full teaspoons of clove will dominate everything.
- "A little milk"Genuinely open-ended. Six eggs plus the apple moisture will take most of the flour; add milk a tablespoon at a time until the mixture drops reluctantly from the spoon. It should be stiff, not pourable.
- YieldThe weighed ingredients come to about five pounds before the eggs, nearer six with them — considerably more than one basin's worth. Several smaller puddings steam more reliably than one giant one; six hours is right for the full quantity, four to five for a quart basin.
- Keeping and reheatingBoiled puddings improve after resting. Cool completely, re-cover with fresh parchment, and refrigerate; steam for an hour to an hour and a half to reheat. Serve hot with hard sauce, brandy butter or a custard, which the recipe leaves to the cook.
Plum pudding kept the name long after prunes and dried plums left the recipe: "plums" was the older English word for dried fruit generally, and by the nineteenth century raisins and currants had taken over the job. The dish descends from the savoury boiled and stuffed puddings of earlier English cookery, which is why suet, breadcrumbs and flour still anchor a sweet dessert, and its association with Christmas is generally traced to the Victorian period, when Dickens and the Christmas annuals fixed the flaming pudding as the ritual end of the meal. That an American cook could set down her own version of it shows how thoroughly the English pudding had been adopted in the United States by the turn of the century. This one carries no brandy or ale in the batter, though in puddings of this type spirits were often poured over at serving rather than mixed in.