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Half a Nutmeg (Little Salt)
A little Salt.
Chop up the suet, wash and dry the currants, stone the raisins, clean the sultanas, taking off the stalks, cut up the peel, blanch and chop up the almonds. Put the flour into a basin and rub the Q2 suet into the flour with your hands, sprinkle in a little salt, add the crumbs, currants, raisins, sultanas, sugar, and peel, and mix all well together. Grate in half a nutmeg, the rind of the lemon, and add the almonds. Put the eggs into another basin, stir to them the milk and brandy, and mix them with the fruit, &c., taking care to mix all these ingredients very thoroughly together. Turn the pudding into a mould or floured puddingcloth, put it into boiling water, and let it boil for five or six hours.
This is a boiled plum pudding of the standard Victorian Christmas type, printed here without its ingredient quantities — the heading and list have been separated from the method. Treat it as a technique guide and take proportions from a full plum pudding recipe.
- The missing quantitiesThe text names flour, breadcrumbs, suet, currants, raisins, sultanas, sugar, candied peel, almonds, lemon, nutmeg, eggs, milk and brandy but gives no weights. Period plum puddings vary a good deal in proportion, and this one is unusual in using both flour and crumbs, so do not guess: use a measured recipe of the same period or a modern one.
- SuetFresh beef suet chopped by hand was the norm; packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, behaves the same and saves the work. Rub it into the flour cold so it stays in flakes rather than smearing.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to about 2 to 3 teaspoons, so half is roughly one to one and a half teaspoons. That is assertive by modern taste in a pudding that already carries lemon and brandy.
- Cleaning the fruitNineteenth-century currants and sultanas arrived gritty and stalky, hence the washing, drying and stalk-picking. Modern dried fruit needs none of it, though raisins still occasionally carry a stone if bought whole from a specialist.
- Blanching almondsPour boiling water over whole almonds, stand two minutes, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Blanched almonds sold ready-skinned are identical for this purpose.
- Cloth versus basinA floured pudding cloth gives the round cannonball shape and a slightly drier skin; a greased basin covered with pleated parchment and foil, tied under the rim, is far easier to handle. Either way the pudding goes into water already at a rolling boil.
- Five or six hoursThe long boil is not a mistake — it is what darkens the pudding and melts the suet through the crumb. Keep the water at least halfway up the mould and top up from a boiling kettle rather than cold water; cooks of the period held that a check in the boiling made the pudding heavy.
- Serving and keepingNo quantities survive here, so the yield cannot be stated. Made ahead, a pudding of this type keeps for weeks in a cool larder in its cloth or covered basin, and is reheated by steaming for a further one to two hours before turning out.
This is the English boiled plum pudding: no plums, but suet, breadcrumbs, dried vine fruit, peel, spice, eggs and spirit, boiled for the better part of a day. The name survives from the medieval and early modern sense of "plum" as any dried fruit, and the dish is generally traced back to spiced meat-and-fruit pottages that lost their meat and gained their eggs and flour over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the time recipes of this kind were being written, the pudding had been firmly attached to Christmas dinner, largely through nineteenth-century domestic writing and illustration, and it reflects a kitchen that expected to keep a copper of water boiling for the whole afternoon.