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Plum Pudding, Unrivalled
INGREDIENTS for 3 moderate-sized puddings.-1 1/2 lb. of muscatel raisins, 1 3/4 lb. of currants, 1 lb. of sultana raisins, 2 lbs. of the finest moist sugar, 2 lbs. of breadcrumbs, 16 eggs, 2 lbs. of finely chopped suet, 6 oz. of mixed candied peel, the rind of 2 lemons, 1 oz. of ground nutmeg, 1 oz. of ground cinnamon, oz. of pounded bitter almonds, pint of brandy. AVERAGE COST, 7s. 6d.
Stone and cut up the raisins, but do not chop them; wash and dry the currants, and cut the candied peel into thin slices.
Mix all the dry ingredients well together, and moisten with the eggs, which should be well beaten and strained, to the pudding; stir in the brandy, and, when all is thoroughly mixed, well butter and flour a stout new pudding-cloth; put in the pudding, tie it down very tightly and closely, boil from 6 to 8 hours, and serve with brandy-sauce. A few sweet almonds, blanched and cut in strips, and stuck on the pudding, ornament it prettily. This quantity may be divided and boiled in buttered moulds. For small families this is the most desirable way, as the above will be found to make a pudding of rather large dimensions.
TIME.-6 to 8 hours.
SEASONABLE in winter.
This is a Victorian boiled Christmas pudding at full scale, and it carries one ingredient that rules it out for a modern kitchen: pounded bitter almonds. The notes below explain the problem and unpack the archaic quantities for readers who want to understand the text rather than cook from it.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding and mixing into a wet batter does. Boiling may drive off some of it, but the dose is not measurable from this text, and unprocessed bitter almonds are restricted or unavailable as a retail food item in the UK and US and controlled in parts of Europe. Use a current Christmas pudding recipe instead.
- The quantity is unreadable anywayThe text gives "oz. of pounded bitter almonds" and "pint of brandy" with the fractions dropped — probably ½ in each case, though ¼ is equally possible. As printed the amounts are indeterminate, so the toxic ingredient has no stated quantity and cannot be scaled or judged.
- What the almonds were doingBitter almonds were the period's source of benzaldehyde, the marzipan note. Nineteenth-century cooks used a few of them the way a modern cook reaches for almond extract, and Beeton's books call for them freely in puddings, custards and ratafias.
- Suet, sugar and crumbs"Finest moist sugar" is a soft, damp, pale brown unrefined sugar; "finely chopped suet" is raw beef kidney fat, bought in a block and reduced with a knife rather than grated from a packet of shredded suet. Breadcrumbs, not flour, carry the whole structure here.
- Scale and costRoughly 9 lb of fruit, sugar, crumbs and suet plus sixteen eggs — Beeton says it makes three moderate puddings, i.e. a household batch meant to be shared out and stored. The 7s. 6d. average cost was a serious sum, of the same order as a week's cash wages for a general servant, though such wages varied a good deal.
- The clothA "stout new pudding-cloth", buttered and floured, was the standard vessel before basins and greaseproof paper became universal. The flour forms a skin that keeps water out over six to eight hours in the pot; the buttered mould mentioned at the end is the alternative for smaller households.
Plum pudding descends from the spiced meat-and-fruit plum pottage of the seventeenth century, which thickened over time into a boiled pudding as breadcrumbs and suet replaced the broth and the meat dropped out — "plum" kept its older sense of any dried fruit, which is why there are raisins, currants and sultanas but no plums. When Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management appeared — issued in parts from 1859 and as a book in 1861 — the boiled pudding served with brandy sauce was already fixed as the centrepiece of an English Christmas, a role Dickens had helped cement in A Christmas Carol in 1843.