Home › Pudding Recipes › Plum Pudding
Plum Pudding
1/4 lb. (1 cup) bread crumbs 1/2 cupful blanched, chopped 4 ozs. (1 cup) flour 4 ozs. (1 cup) brown sugar 1 cupful chopped suet I lemon 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt 4 eggs Milk to moisten 1 cupful chopped citron peel almonds 1/2 pint (I cup) Sultana raisins 1/2 pint (1 cup) currants 1/2 pint (I cup) seeded raisins 1 teaspoonful powdered allspice ½ teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1 teaspoonful powdered cin namon 1 wineglassful brandy
A classic English boiled or steamed Christmas pudding, given here as a shopping list of dry goods, fruit and spice. The measurements mix imperial weights with American cup equivalents, and several of the older terms need translating.
- WineglassfulIn cookbooks of this period a wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, that is a quarter cup. That would be the brandy for the batter; any further brandy for flaming or feeding the pudding would be extra.
- Half a pint of fruitThe dried fruit is measured by volume, not weight: half a pint is one cup, as the parenthetical notes confirm. Three cups of raisins and currants in total, plus a cup of citron peel.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys and is not the same as ordinary trimmed fat or shortening. Butchers will supply it on request; it should be chilled hard, stripped of membrane and either chopped fine or grated with a little of the recipe's flour to keep it separate.
- Sultanas and citronSultanas are golden raisins. Candied citron peel is still sold at Christmas but has become scarce the rest of the year; candied orange and lemon peel is the usual substitute, though it is sweeter and less resinous.
- The lemonOne lemon here most likely means the grated zest, and possibly the juice as well; the list does not say which. Zest before juicing, and take only the yellow.
- Milk to moistenThe batter should be soft enough to drop heavily from a spoon but not pourable. Expect roughly half a cup to a cup of milk depending on how dry the crumbs are; add it last, a little at a time.
- Steaming, not bakingA pudding of this composition is cooked by long moist heat, not in a dry oven. Filled two-thirds full, covered tightly, and set on a rack in a covered pan of simmering water, a pudding this size needs four to six hours, with the water topped up from a kettle so it never drops below halfway up the mould.
- Doneness and yieldThe pudding is done when it is firm, dark and springs back to a press; a skewer will come out clean but slightly sticky from the fruit. The quantities add up to something over three pounds of pudding, enough for eight to twelve servings, and puddings of this kind are generally said to improve after several weeks' storage in a cool place.
Plum pudding kept its name long after it stopped containing plums: in medieval and early modern English, "plum" meant any dried fruit, and the raisins, currants and sultanas here are the direct descendants of that usage. The dish grew out of earlier pottages of meat, suet and dried fruit, gradually shedding the meat and stiffening into a boiled pudding tied in a floured cloth, and by the nineteenth century it was fixed in place as the centrepiece of the English Christmas dinner. The spices are often said to have helped preserve it, though it is the sugar, fat and spirit that do the keeping: heavily sugared, fatted and spirited, it was made weeks ahead and kept.