Home › Puddings and Desserts › English Plum Pudding
English Plum Pudding
1/2 pound raisins 1/2 pound chopped suet 3 cups bread crumbs 1/2 cup brown sugar Grated rind of 1/2 lemon 1/4 orange peel, minced 1/2 cup flour 1/2 pound currants 1/4 nutmeg, grated 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly. Beat the eggs; add them to the milk and pour over the dry mixture. Mix thoroughly; pack in greased tins, leaving space of one inch at the top of each. Tie on the lids and boil for ten hours. Keep in a cool place until needed. Serve with hard sauce.
A traditional boiled suet pudding, meant to be made ahead and reheated. Two things matter most: the pudding must be steamed rather than truly boiled, and the water level must never be allowed to fall away from the tins during the long cooking.
- Ten hours, and whyTen hours is far longer than the mixture needs simply to set; the extended cooking softens the suet through the crumbs and darkens the pudding. The recipe directs that the closed tins be boiled, but in a modern kitchen it is easier to set them on a rack in a deep pot with water halfway up their sides, keep it at a bare simmer, and top up with boiling water every hour or so. If the pot boils dry the tins scorch and the pudding is ruined.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; ask a butcher, or buy shredded packet suet. It is not interchangeable with butter or shortening here — suet melts at a higher temperature and leaves the crumb open rather than greasy. Chop it very fine, or freeze and grate it.
- "1/4 nutmeg, grated"A whole nutmeg grates down to roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons, so a quarter is about half to three-quarters of a teaspoon. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg is markedly weaker.
- "1/4 orange peel"This means the peel from a quarter of an orange, zest only, minced fine — the white pith is bitter. Candied peel would also have been acceptable in a pudding of this type and gives a sweeter result.
- Bread crumbsDry, fine crumbs from a plain white loaf, not the coarse fresh crumb and not seasoned crumbs from a canister. Three cups of fine dry crumbs weighs on the order of 10 to 12 ounces.
- Tins and lidsPeriod pudding tins came with lids that tied down. Use ceramic or metal pudding basins, or heatproof bowls: a round of greased parchment on the surface, then foil pleated across the top, tied under the rim with string. The pleat gives the pudding room to rise; the inch of headspace in the original is the same idea.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Some markets sell them only as "Zante currants" or "black currants" in the dried-fruit aisle; raisins are a passable substitute if nothing else is available.
- Keeping and reheatingA pudding this rich, thoroughly cooked and sealed, was traditionally stored for weeks in a cool larder. In a modern kitchen keep it refrigerated, and re-steam for about an hour and a half before serving so it goes to the table hot. Hard sauce is butter creamed with powdered sugar and brandy or vanilla, served cold against the hot pudding.
- YieldThe quantities make roughly 3 pounds of mixture — one large basin or two small ones, serving eight to ten.
The "plum" in plum pudding is a survival of an older English usage in which plums meant dried fruit generally, chiefly raisins; the recipe contains no plum, though early versions of its ancestor did sometimes include prunes. The dish descends from plum pottage, recorded from the seventeenth century, a spiced meat-and-fruit broth thickened with breadcrumbs, which over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lost its meat, kept its suet, and stiffened into something that could be boiled in a cloth or a basin. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was fixed in English and American minds as the Christmas pudding, carried in household manuals as a matter of course, one whose keeping quality meant the work could be done well before the holiday itself.