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English Plum Pudding
1 lb. suet 2½ lb. flour Jessie Dollenmaier. ½ pt. sweet milk 2 grated nutmegs 12 eggs Free suet from strings and chop fine. Dredge raisins with flour; cut citron fine. Cream butter and sugar, beat in yolks of eggs whipped light, add milk, then the flour, with which the suet has been mixed, alternately with the whites of eggs beaten stiff. Then add spice and fruit, nuts, if desired. Boil or steam 5 hours or 2½ hours in pressure cooker. Makes six puddings.
Edith Wells.
The printed ingredient list is plainly incomplete — the method calls for butter, sugar, raisins, citron and spice that were never given quantities, and two names are tangled into the list. Treat this as a skeleton of a very large Victorian-style boiled pudding rather than a recipe you can follow line by line.
- The missing amountsOnly suet, flour, milk, nutmeg and eggs are quantified. Butter, sugar, raisins and citron appear in the method with no measure at all. For a batch built on 2½ lb flour and 1 lb suet, a typical pudding of this era would carry roughly a pound each of sugar and butter and two to three pounds of dried fruit, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, and it needs to be picked free of membrane and chopped or grated very fine so it melts through the batter during the long steam. Packaged shredded suet, fresh or vegetarian, is the practical substitute; butter alone will not give the same open, moist crumb.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk also kept in kitchens of the period. Use 3 cups for the 1½ pints called for.
- Two grated nutmegsWhole nutmegs, grated — somewhere in the region of 4 to 6 teaspoons, a genuinely heavy hand by modern taste. The "spice" added later is unspecified; cinnamon, cloves, mace and allspice are common companions.
- Dredging the fruitTossing raisins and citron in some of the measured flour keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom of the basin. Take that flour from the 2½ lb, not in addition to it.
- Boiling versus steamingFill greased pudding basins or floured cloths no more than two-thirds full, cover tightly, and keep the water at a bare simmer topped up throughout the five hours. If the water stops touching the vessel the pudding stalls and turns heavy.
- The pressure cooker noteThis is the tell that the book sits at the edge of the modern era. Some pressure cooker instructions for puddings had the basin steamed with the vent open first, to let the batter set, before bringing the pot up to pressure. Any pressure cooker used now should be run to its own manufacturer's instructions for steamed puddings.
- YieldSix puddings — a batch scale rather than a single dessert. Steamed puddings of this type were commonly wrapped, stored cool and reheated by steaming again before serving; how well this particular milk-based batter would keep is not something the page tells us.
Plum pudding kept its name long after the plums left: "plum" meant any dried fruit in early modern English, and by the nineteenth century the pudding was built on raisins, currants and candied citron. It descends from much older boiled meat-and-fruit puddings, which is why suet survives in it, and it was fixed in the popular imagination as the Christmas dish by the Victorians.