Home › Hot Desserts › Christmas Plum Pudding No. 2
Christmas Plum Pudding No. 2
1 pound of raisins 1 pound of sultanas 1/2 pound sugar 3/4 pound butter 1/2 pound bread crumbs 1/4 pound flour 1/2 pound almonds 1/4 pound of Brazils 1/4 pound crystallized cherries 6 ounces of peel 1 tablespoon mixed spice 1/4 of a nutmeg 1/2 lemon and rind 1/2 carrot grated 1/4 pound walnuts 1/2 tumbler brandy Proceed in the same way as in No. 1, by mixing all the dry ingredients first together; the nuts should all be carefully prepared by removing every particle of skin, and put them through the nut mill twice if necessary; then pound them well in a mortar. Put into buttered molds, and steam about three hours. Grate the carrot, cut the crystallized cherries up fine, add these to the mixture, stir well, and allow to stand over night. Add the brandy next morning, and follow the same directions with regard to boiling.
A very large pudding — roughly six pounds of mixture before the brandy — built without suet, which is the whole point of its inclusion in a meatless book. The instructions are given out of order; read them through before you start.
- Fix the order firstThe original tells you to fill the molds and steam, then to grate the carrot and cut the cherries. Do all the mixing, add carrot and cherries, rest the mixture overnight, stir in the brandy in the morning, and only then fill the molds and steam.
- Half a tumbler of brandyTumblers of the period varied, but commonly held something like 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so half would be roughly 4 to 5 fluid ounces (1/2 to 2/3 cup). This is genuinely approximate; measure by feel for a mixture that just drops from the spoon.
- Mixed spiceA British blend, typically some combination of cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg, ginger, allspice and cloves, though proportions and ingredients vary from maker to maker. Any pumpkin-pie-style blend is close enough, though it leans sweeter and heavier on cinnamon.
- Peel and crystallized cherriesPeel means candied citrus peel — mixed orange, lemon and citron — sold by weight rather than in the small tubs of chopped mixed peel. Crystallized cherries are glace cherries; rinse off the heaviest syrup and dry them before chopping or they sink.
- The nutsBlanching almonds is straightforward; Brazils and walnuts do not skin easily, and their skins bring bitterness. Two passes through a grinder gives a coarse meal, and the pounding breaks the nuts down further into a paste-like mass that helps hold the mixture together. A food processor pulsed in short bursts does both jobs, but stop before it turns to butter.
- No eggs, so no riseThere is no leavening and nothing to set beyond starch and butter. Pack the molds firmly, leave about an inch of headroom, and cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil, or a floured cloth tied under the rim, so condensation cannot get in.
- SteamingThree hours at a steady simmer with water halfway up the molds, as the recipe directs. Top up with boiling water; if the pot goes dry the pudding scorches and the mold cracks. A single large pudding rather than several small ones will need considerably longer.
- Yield and keepingRoughly enough for two 1 1/2-quart basins; a pudding this rich goes a long way, so expect a dozen or more small servings from each. Puddings of this richness are traditionally kept for some weeks in a cool dark place; steam again for an hour or so to serve, with hard sauce or brandy butter.
Plum pudding has contained no plums since the eighteenth century, "plums" being an older English word for raisins and dried fruit generally. What makes this version worth noticing is the butter: the traditional Christmas pudding is bound with beef suet, and there is none here. Vegetarian and reform cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spent a good deal of ingenuity on substitutes for suet and lard, and this pudding's heavy hand with pounded nuts — almonds, Brazils and walnuts, ground twice and then worked in a mortar — sits in that tradition. The grated carrot is an older trick than wartime rationing made it sound: it appears in puddings for moisture and sweetness long before twentieth-century sugar shortages, and nineteenth-century cookbooks carry recipes for carrot pudding in its own right.