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Plum Pudding (Dozen eggs pounds baker's)
3 dozen eggs. 3 pounds baker's bread, stale, and grated fine. 3 pounds suet. 3 pounds brown sugar. 1 pound sliced citron. 3 pounds currants. 4 pounds seeded raisins. 1/2 ounce nutmeg, and the same of mace, cloves, and cinnamon. Half pint wine. Half pint French cooking brandy.
Mix and divide into six parts. Tie each part in a twilled cotton cloth, put them in boiling water, and let them boil four hours. Then hang them in the air to dry a day or two. Keep them in a cool, dry place. When you wish to use one, it must be boiled an hour before dinner. Serve with rich sauce. It will keep six months or a year.--Mrs. T. M. C. Plum Pudding. 10 eggs. 1 pound chopped suet. 1 pound seeded raisins. 1 pound currants. 1 pound stale bread crumbs. 1/2 pound citron. 1 nutmeg. 1 wine-glassful wine. 1 wine-glassful brandy. 1/2 pound brown sugar.
Beat the eggs light, add the sugar and spices, stir in the suet and bread crumbs, add the fruit by degrees, then the wine and brandy. Pour into a well-floured bag, leaving a third as much room as the mixture occupies, for swelling. Put into a pot of boiling water and boil four hours. Dip the bag into cold water when ready to turn out the pudding, to prevent it from sticking.--Mrs. E. B.
Plum Pudding.
At sunrise, sift a quart of the best flour; rub into it an Irish potato mashed, free from lumps. Put in it a teaspoonful of salt, and a half teacup of yeast. Add six eggs, beaten separately, and enough water to make a soft dough. Knead half an hour without intermission. In winter, set it in a warm place, in summer set it in a cool place to rise. If dinner is wanted at two o'clock, knead into this at one o'clock, half pound of butter, two pounds of stoned raising, cut up, and a grated nutmeg. Work very little, just enough to mix. Wet a thick cloth, flour it and tie it loosely that the pudding may have room to rise. Put it in a kettle of milk-warm water, heating slowly until it boils. Boil one hour. Serve with wine sauce.--Mrs. S. T.
Three separate puddings under one heading: a six-pudding batch for a large household, a single family-sized version, and a yeast-raised pudding that is really a boiled sweet bread. All are cloth-boiled, which is the part modern cooks find unfamiliar.
- Scale firstMrs. T. M. C.'s version uses three dozen eggs and about 14 lb of fruit, sugar and suet (17 lb if you count the bread), and yields six puddings of roughly 3 1/2 to 4 lb each. Unless you are provisioning a household for the season, work from Mrs. E. B.'s recipe, which makes one pudding serving 10 to 12.
- Old measuresA wine-glassful is about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup). Half a pint is one cup. "Half ounce" of each spice in the large recipe is roughly 2 tablespoons of ground nutmeg or cinnamon by volume; one whole nutmeg grates to about 2 teaspoons.
- SuetBeef leaf suet is the fat that makes these puddings light rather than greasy; it melts high and leaves an open crumb. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Chill it hard and grate rather than chop, and do not substitute butter, which melts too early and gives a dense, damp pudding.
- Bread, not flourThe first two puddings are bound with grated stale bread rather than flour, which is what keeps them tender over a long boil. Use a plain white loaf two or three days old and grate or process it fine; fresh bread packs into paste.
- The clothBoil the cloth, then flour the wet cloth heavily before filling it: the flour forms the skin that keeps water out. Mrs. E. B. leaves a third again in room for swelling, and Mrs. S. T. ties her cloth loosely for the same reason; the first recipe says only to tie each part in a twilled cotton cloth. A greased and floured pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil, boiled in a covered pot with water halfway up, is the easier modern equivalent.
- Water levelFour hours at a steady simmer means topping up with boiling water as it evaporates. If cold water goes in, or the pudding is allowed to stop boiling, the centre sets badly.
- StoringDo not rely on the claim that these will keep six months or a year; the recipe hangs them in the air a day or two and then stores them in a cool, dry place. A cooked suet pudding today should go into the refrigerator once cool, or be double-wrapped and frozen. Reheat by boiling or steaming an hour, as the original directs.
- The third recipeMrs. S. T.'s pudding is raisins and nutmeg only, with no currants, citron or other spice, and is leavened with yeast and a mashed potato, a common trick for keeping dough moist. The half teacup of yeast means a liquid barm or home-made yeast; a couple of teaspoons of instant dry yeast is an approximate substitute, and it needs the same long morning rise she allows it.
- Sauce"Rich sauce" and "wine sauce" here mean a hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar beaten with sherry or brandy, or a stirred custard sharpened with wine. Neither is optional; the puddings are dry without one.
The "plums" in plum pudding are raisins and currants, not fresh fruit: "plum" was commonly used in English for dried grapes from the seventeenth century onward, and it survives fossilised in this name and in plum cake. The dish descends from the older savoury boiled pottages of meat, suet and dried fruit, which lost the meat and gained sugar as the eighteenth century went on, and by the Victorian period it was firmly attached to Christmas dinner. What is characteristically Virginian in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (usually dated 1878, with 1879 printings) is the scale of the first contribution -- six puddings boiled at once and hung to dry -- which reflects a household cooking with hired or, a generation earlier, enslaved kitchen labour and no refrigeration, where the whole point of a suet pudding was that it kept. The "French cooking brandy" appears to have been cheap spirit meant for the kitchen rather than the decanter, though it is not a documented trade category.