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Plum Pudding, A Pound
1/2 lb. of flour, 1/2 pint of milk, INGREDIENTS for pudding for 12 persons.-1/4 lb. of suet, 1 lb. of currants, 1 lb. of stoned raisins, 8 eggs, 1 grated nutmeg, 2 oz. of sliced candied peel, 1 teaspoonful of ground ginger, lb. of bread-crumbs, lb. of flour, pint of milk. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Chop the suet finely; mix with it the dry ingredients; stir these well together, BAKED PUDDING OR CAKE MOULD. and add the well-beaten eggs and milk to moisten with. Beat up the mixture well, and should the above proportion of milk not be found sufficient to make it of the proper consistency, a little more should be added. Press the pudding into a mould, tie it in a floured cloth, and boil for 5 hours, or rather longer, and serve with brandy sauce.
TIME.-5 hours, or longer.
SEASONABLE in winter.
Note. The above pudding may be baked instead of boiled; it should be put into a buttered mould or tin, and baked for about 2 hours; a smaller one would take about 1 1/4 hour.
Plum Pudding. (Fresh Fruit.) INGREDIENTS for pudding for 6 or 8 persons. - 3/4 lb. of suet crust, 1½ pint of Orleans or any other kind of plum, 1/4 lb. of moist sugar.
AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Line a pudding-basin with suet crust rolled out to the thickness of about½ inch; fill the basin with the fruit, put in the sugar and cover with crust. Fold the edges over, and pinch them together to prevent the juice escaping. Tie over a floured cloth, put the pudding into boiling water, and boil from 2 to 24 hours. Turn it out of the basin, and serve quickly.
TIME,-2 to 2 hours.
PLUMS, FRENCH, STEWED.
SEASONABLE, with various kinds of plums, from the beginning of August to the beginning of October. Plum Pudding. (Vegetarian Recipe.) -INGREDIENTS for pudding for 6 persons. -1 lb. of flour, 1/2 lb. of sultanas, 1/2 lb. of currants, 1 lb. of butter, rind of 1 lemon, 3 eggs, a teaspoonful of baking-powder. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 4d.
Mix the powder with the flour, rub in the butter, add to them the currants, washed and dried, the sultanas, picked over, and a little nutmeg, if liked. Mix with the eggs, well beaten, and a little milk, if necessary.
Put the pudding in a buttered basin, and steam for 4 hours. Serve with wine sauce.
TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE in winter.
Three separate puddings sit side by side here: the rich boiled "pound" pudding, a summer plum pudding made with fresh plums in a suet crust, and a lighter meat-free version steamed in a basin. All three depend on long, unbroken moist heat.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fractions in this printing: the breadcrumbs, flour and milk in the first pudding. The vegetarian recipe's "1 lb. of butter" to 1 lb. of flour also looks like a misprint for a smaller quantity, though the page as printed gives no fraction. In the absence of the originals, judge by consistency rather than the printed figure and add liquid a little at a time.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher, chopped fine with a little of the flour to stop it clumping, gives the best texture. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works and saves twenty minutes; use it weight for weight.
- The consistency testThis is the hinge. A boiled pudding batter should drop reluctantly from the spoon — stiff enough to hold its shape in the mould, loose enough not to bake dry in the middle. Add milk a spoonful at a time; the recipe expects you to.
- Boiling the cloth puddingFlour the cloth generously so the surface sets into a skin, tie it with string leaving room to swell, and keep the water at a steady simmer with a plate or trivet under the basin. Top up with boiling water, never cold, or the pudding sinks. Five hours means five hours.
- Baked versionThe note gives only "baked for about 2 hours" in a buttered mould or tin; no oven heat is stated, so a moderate oven (in modern terms somewhere around 325-350F) is a reasonable working guess rather than the book's instruction. The garbled shorter time for a smaller pudding most likely stood as 1 1/2 hours. Cover if the top colours before the centre is set.
- Fresh plum pudding timingThe boiling time is printed twice and mangled both times ("2 to 24 hours", "2 to 2 hours"); two to two and a half hours is right for a basin lined with suet crust. Orleans is an old English plum variety -- any firm, tart cooking plum will do, stoned or not as you prefer, though stoned is kinder to guests.
- Sealing the crustPinch the lid to the lining hard and pleat the cloth or foil over the top. Escaping juice means a collapsed pudding and a pan of pink water.
- The vegetarian versionVegetarian here means only that it contains no suet; it still uses butter and eggs. Steam it rather than boil it — the basin sits above the water, covered, for four hours.
- Yield and servingThe first pudding serves twelve and keeps well wrapped and chilled; reheat by steaming for an hour. Brandy sauce, wine sauce or plain cream all belong. The stated costs, two shillings and a shilling and fourpence, are Victorian and not convertible to anything useful today.
The boiled plum pudding descends from a medieval pottage of meat, dried fruit and spice that gradually shed its meat and kept its suet, until by the eighteenth century it was a sweet pudding boiled in a cloth. "Plum" had by then long meant raisin or dried fruit generally, whatever the name might suggest. The fresh-fruit version printed alongside is a different animal altogether — a straightforward suet-crust fruit pudding, seasonable from August to October, when English plums came in — and it shows how loosely the name travelled. The vegetarian recipe is a marker of its moment: organised vegetarianism in Britain dates from the 1840s, and by the time Beeton's name was on compendium volumes like this one, publishers thought it worth offering a version of the national pudding that left the beef fat out.