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English Plum Pudding
1 pound of stale bread grated. 1 pound currants. 1 pound sugar. 1 pound of suet chopped as fine as flour. 1/4 of a pound of raisins, and the same of citron.
When ready to boil, wet the above with ten eggs, well beaten, two wine-glasses of wine and the same of brandy. Grate the rinds of two lemons, pare and chop them and beat all well together. Then dip a strong cloth in boiling water and wring it dry. Lay it on a waiter, greasing well with butter. Put it in a large bowl and pour the pudding in, putting two sticks in the cloth across each other, and tying below the sticks. Have the water boiling and throw in the pudding as soon as tied. Put a plate at the bottom of the pot and boil four hours.--Mrs. Dr. S.
A boiled pudding of the old school: no flour at all, the structure coming entirely from grated stale bread, suet and ten eggs. The critical thing is water management — the pot must stay at a rolling boil, topped up with boiling water, for the whole four hours.
- Wine-glassA wine-glass in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is about 2 fluid ounces, so two glasses each of wine and brandy comes to roughly 1/2 cup of each. Use a fortified wine such as sherry, madeira or port rather than table wine.
- Bread, not flourA pound of grated stale bread makes a large volume of crumbs — roughly 8 cups if they are soft and light, considerably less if grated very dry and fine. Use a plain white loaf that has dried for a day or two and grate or process it fine; commercial dried breadcrumbs are too sandy and will make the pudding gritty.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, is what makes this pudding light rather than greasy. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. "Chopped as fine as flour" is literal: work it cold, or freeze and grate it, so it melts through the crumbs during the long boil and leaves the texture open.
- The lemons"Grate the rinds of two lemons, pare and chop them" is ambiguous as written — it appears to mean the peel is grated and the fruit then pared and chopped in as well. Grated zest plus the juice is the safer reading; whole chopped lemon flesh, pith included, will turn bitter.
- The pudding clothScald a large square of unbleached cotton or a fine linen tea towel, wring it out, and butter it generously, then flour it lightly as well — the flour forms the skin that keeps water out. Line a bowl with the cloth, fill, gather the top and tie, leaving room for expansion.
- The two sticksThe crossed sticks are handles: tie the cloth below them so the pudding can be lifted in and out of boiling water and hung to drain afterwards. A modern equivalent is a lidded pudding basin in a covered pot of simmering water, though the cloth gives the traditional round shape and dark skin.
- Plate in the potThe plate at the bottom keeps the cloth off the hot metal so it cannot scorch or stick. Keep the water above the level of the pudding and add only boiling water when it drops; cold water will stall the cooking and can make a heavy streak.
- Yield and servingThis is a large pudding — the fruit and fat alone come to two and a half pounds, before the pound of bread, pound of sugar and ten eggs — and will serve 12 to 16 in the small wedges these puddings are meant for. Serve hot with hard sauce or a brandy sauce. Wrapped and kept cool it improves over weeks, and slices reheat by steaming for half an hour.
Boiled plum pudding reached Virginia tables as an inherited English Christmas dish, and by the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia appeared (it is variously dated 1878 and 1879) the "plums" had long since ceased to mean plums at all — the word had shifted to cover raisins, currants and candied peel generally. The pudding cloth, rather than the basin, is the older method: it comes into use in the seventeenth century, when a bag of cloth replaced the animal gut or skin that puddings had previously been boiled in, and it is usually credited with the round shape. What suggests this is an older-style version is the absence of flour and the sheer number of eggs, ten of them binding a pound of bread and a pound of suet, a richer proportion than the flour-and-breadcrumb puddings that later became common. Marion Cabell Tyree's book gathers such recipes under the names of their contributors, and "Mrs. Dr. S." is typical of the initialled attributions that gave a community cookbook its authority.