Home › Desserts › Christmas Plum Pudding
Christmas Plum Pudding
2 cups soft bread crumbs 2 cups chopped suet 1 cup chopped raisins 1 cup chopped citron 1 cup cleaned currants 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon nutmeg 6 eggs ½ cup brandy 1/2 tablespoon lemon rind Mix ingredients; pour into buttered mold; cover and steam four hours; bake in oven one half hour. Serve with Wine Sauce.
A lean, old-style boiled pudding: no flour, no sugar, and no leavening beyond the six eggs, which do all the binding and lifting. Read the ingredient list carefully before you shop, because it assumes several things a modern cook no longer has on hand.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers as a solid lump or ready shredded. Chill it hard and grate it rather than chopping; packaged vegetarian suet works, and 2 cups is roughly 8 oz. Butter is not a substitute here — suet melts later in the steaming and leaves the crumb open.
- Soft bread crumbsNot dry crumbs from a canister. Tear the crumb of a day-old loaf and rub it through your fingers; 2 cups of these weigh about 4 oz. Dried crumbs will absorb far more liquid and give a dense, pasty pudding.
- CitronCandied citron peel, the thick-cut fruit still sold in tubs at Christmas, not the lemon-like fresh citron. Chop it to raisin size. Mixed candied peel is the usual modern stand-in.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small grape, not fresh red or black currants. "Cleaned" means picked over for stems and grit — a step largely unnecessary with packaged fruit today, though a quick rinse and pat dry does no harm.
- No sugarThe list gives none, and that is not a misprint: sweetness comes from the dried fruit, the citron and the wine sauce poured over. If you want a sweeter pudding, a half cup of brown sugar folded in with the crumbs will not harm the mixture, though the recipe as printed calls for none.
- The mold and the steamingThe mixture runs to something over two quarts, so use a 3 quart pudding basin or tube mold, or divide it between two smaller ones; butter it, fill no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with a pleated foil and parchment lid tied down or a clipped lid. Set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water halfway up the sides, lid on, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full four hours, topping up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- The oven finishThe half hour in the oven dries the surface and firms the top. The recipe names no temperature; a moderate oven, uncovered, is the usual reading for a finishing bake of this kind.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer to the center should come out clean and the pudding should be set to the touch rather than sloshing. Rest ten minutes before unmolding. This makes about eight to ten servings.
- KeepingCooled, wrapped and refrigerated, it keeps for weeks and improves; reheat by steaming an hour. The Wine Sauce called for is the book's own, given elsewhere in the volume, and is served warm.
Plum pudding kept its name long after the plums left it: in medieval and early modern English usage "plum" meant any dried fruit, above all raisins, and the dish descends from the spiced meat-and-fruit pottages that thickened over the centuries into a solid, cloth-boiled pudding. By the nineteenth century it was fixed as the ceremonial close of the English Christmas dinner, and American cookbooks reproduced it faithfully as an imported set piece. That this version appears in a Lowney's book — published by a Boston chocolate company to sell cocoa and baking chocolate — says something about how such volumes worked: the promotional recipes carried the brand, but the collection had to include the standard repertoire a housekeeper expected, chocolate or not. The formula here is notably plain beside the flour-and-molasses versions of the same era, relying on eggs and suet alone, with the brandy doing double duty as flavoring and preservative.