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Rich Plum Pudding
Nine eggs beaten to a froth.
Add flour sufficient to make a thick batter, free from lumps. Then add one pint of new milk and beat well. Afterwards add the following ingredients, in small quantities at a time, keeping it well stirred. Two pounds stoned raisins, two pounds currants, well washed, picked, and dried. One-quarter pound bitter almonds, blanched and divided; three-quarters pound brown sugar; three-quarters pound beef suet, chopped fine; one nutmeg, grated fine; one teaspoonful of ground allspice, the same of mace and cinnamon.
This pudding should be mixed several days before cooking, then well beaten, and more milk should be added, if required. Make this into two puddings, put in cotton bags and boil four hours. By changing the bags, and hanging in a cool, dry place, they will keep six months and be the better for it. Steam and serve with sauce made as follows:
One cup of sugar, one of butter. Beat well together: Break an egg in and mix well. Add a tablespoonful of wine or brandy, and serve immediately.--Mrs. F.
This is a full-scale Victorian boiled plum pudding, and one ingredient puts it beyond the reach of a modern kitchen. The problem is not the suet, the boiling time or the six-month hang; it is the quarter pound of bitter almonds.
- Bitter almonds are the hinge, and they are toxicBitter almonds (Prunus dulcis var. amara) contain amygdalin, which enzymes in the crushed kernel convert to hydrogen cyanide in the presence of moisture. A quarter pound is roughly 100 to 120 kernels, divided through a batter and split between two puddings — an amount far outside any range considered safe, and the raw batter stands and is stirred over several days before any heat is applied.
- Boiling does not make them safeHeat destroys the enzyme and drives off some of the cyanide, but the four-hour boil in a cloth bag is not a controlled process and cannot be relied on to reduce the load to a harmless level. Commercially, bitter almond oil is steam-distilled and the hydrocyanic acid removed before it is sold; that is a factory operation, not a pudding cloth.
- They are not sold as food hereUnprocessed bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States, and are restricted in the UK and much of Europe. Nineteenth-century cooks bought them freely at the grocer's for their marzipan flavour, which is why they turn up so casually in books of this period.
- Storing the boiled puddings for six monthsThe instruction to change the bags and hang the puddings in a cool dry place for half a year assumes a cold larder, a dense fruit mass of low water activity and constant airing. A modern kitchen has none of those conditions, and a suet pudding held at room temperature that long is a mould and rancidity problem quite apart from the almonds.
- The sauce contains raw eggAn egg broken into creamed butter and sugar and served immediately is never cooked. That is an ordinary raw-egg risk rather than the reason for the caution, but it is worth knowing before serving it to anyone vulnerable.
- If you want the puddingUse a current recipe for a boiled or steamed plum pudding. This one is presented as a document of how households cooked in the 1870s, not as working instructions.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of recipes signed only with an initial — "Mrs. F." here — and this plum pudding is a textbook example of the English Christmas pudding as it survived in the American South. "Plum" is the older English word for a dried fruit generally, raisins and currants above all; there has been no plum in a plum pudding for centuries. The suet, the cloth bag, the four-hour boil and the long hanging all descend from the boiled pudding tradition that took hold in England once the pudding cloth replaced the animal gut casing, generally traced to the seventeenth century. Bitter almonds appear because they were the standard source of what we now call almond extract — a few in a batter gave the marzipan note that sweet almonds cannot — and their presence in a household book, unremarked and by the quarter pound, is a fair measure of how much the boundary between grocery and poison has moved.