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Steamed Fruit Pudding
3/4 pound seeded raisins 1/2 pound currants 1/2 pound butter 1/2 pound candied citron 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon nutmeg 5 cups chopped apples 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 1/4 cups milk 1 quart stale bread crumbs--1/2 pound 2 cups flour Juice and rind 1/2 lemon Wash the raisins by pouring boiling water over them, drain, and dry upon clean towels. Cut into quarters. Clean currants by placing them in a colander and shaking flour over them. Rub them carefully in the flour; then place in a pan of cold water, and rinse thoroughly until the water is clean. Dry upon towels in a cool oven or in the sun. Currants may be prepared several days before using, if desired. Slice the citron very fine. If the citron is very hard, it may be softened by steaming. Cream the butter and sugar; add the seasonings, also the lemon juice and rind. Add the milk and one cup of flour alternately. Mix the fruit with the remainder of the flour, and turn into cake mixture. Fold in the grated bread crumbs, and lastly the chopped apples. Turn into a mold, and steam for five hours or boil in a square of cheesecloth, prepared by buttering one side, and then sprinkling with flour. Gather the corners of the cheesecloth, and tie snugly about the pudding. Serve with lemon sauce.
A full-sized boiled pudding in the English Christmas mould, built on butter rather than suet — the reason it appears in a meatless book. It is a large recipe and a long steam, and both need planning.
- YieldWith three pounds of fruit, butter and crumbs plus five cups of apple, this fills a two-quart mould twice over, or roughly 16 to 20 servings. Halve it, or divide among several smaller basins and shorten the steaming to about two and a half hours for pint moulds.
- Skip the fruit washingThe rinsing, flouring and drying described here was to remove grit, stem fragments and packing dust from bulk barrel fruit. Modern packaged raisins and Zante currants need none of it; go straight to quartering the raisins if you want them smaller.
- Candied citronCitron is the thick, bitter-skinned relative of the lemon, sold candied in half-pound chunks or diced. It is now a specialty item — candied orange and lemon peel substitute directly by weight, though the flavour is brighter and less resinous.
- The crumbsThe book helpfully equates a quart of stale crumbs with half a pound. Use dry, day-old bread grated or pulsed fine, not fresh soft crumbs, which pack down and make the pudding heavy.
- No leavening, no eggsThere is neither baking powder nor egg here. The structure comes entirely from flour, crumbs and the long moist heat, so expect a dense, sliceable pudding rather than anything cakelike. Do not add a raising agent to compensate.
- Filling and covering the mouldButter the mould well and fill it no more than two-thirds; the pudding swells. Cover with buttered parchment and foil, or a floured cloth as directed, and tie it down so no condensation drips in.
- Steaming for five hoursSet the mould on a rack in a deep pot with water halfway up its side, keep it at a bare simmer, and check the water level every hour — a pot that boils dry will scorch the pudding and can crack the vessel. Top up with boiling water, never cold.
- Doneness and keepingA skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel firm and pull slightly from the mould. Cooled and wrapped, it will keep a few days in the refrigerator and reheats by steaming again for 45 minutes to an hour; unlike a spirit-soaked plum pudding, this one has no alcohol and does contain milk and fresh apple, so do not count on long storage.
- Lemon sauceThe traditional accompaniment is a cornstarch-thickened sugar syrup finished with lemon juice, rind and butter, served hot and pourable. Hard sauce — butter creamed with powdered sugar — works as well and needs no cooking.
Steamed and boiled fruit puddings are the direct descendants of the English plum pudding, which by the eighteenth century had shed its early meat broth and become a sweetened mass of dried fruit, crumbs and suet boiled in a floured cloth. What makes this version worth noticing is its place in a meatless cookbook: suet, the hard beef kidney fat that gives a traditional pudding its texture, is replaced here by half a pound of butter, and the customary eggs are gone too, with five cups of chopped apple supplying moisture and body. Vegetarian cookery in the early twentieth century is often said to have worked this way, by substitution within familiar dishes rather than invention, so that a household giving up meat need not also give up its Christmas pudding. The lengthy instructions for washing raisins and currants are a reminder that dried fruit then arrived loose and unsorted, and that seeding raisins by hand was ordinary kitchen work — the phrase "seeded raisins" was worth paying for.