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Christmas Plum Pudding
2 lbs. currants. 2 lbs. raisins. 1/2 lb. citron. 1/2 lb. almonds. 1/2 lb. cherries. 1/2 lb. pecans. 1 lb. brown sugar. 1 lb. browned flour. 8 whole eggs. 2 teaspoons baking powder sifted with flour. 1 lb. beef suet or butter. 1/2 lb. bread crumbs. 1 cup molasses. 1 cup whisky. 1 tablespoon salt (if suet is used). 2 teaspoons cinnamon. 1/2 teaspoon cloves. 1 grated nutmeg. Mix suet and sugar well together, then molasses, eggs and crumbs. Add fruit last. Steam for three hours in well-buttered one-pound baking powder cans. This will make eight. Serve with this brown sugar sauce with wine.
A large-format steamed pudding scaled for eight separate moulds rather than one great basin. Two things in the ingredient list will stop a modern cook: browned flour and one-pound baking powder cans.
- Browned flourFlour spread in a shallow pan and toasted in a moderate oven until the colour of weak coffee, then cooled and sifted before measuring. The recipe gives no temperature; the toasting was done mainly for colour. Ten to fifteen minutes with a stir or two is enough; scorched flour tastes bitter.
- The mouldsA one-pound baking powder can held roughly two cups. Use 8 to 10 straight-sided pudding basins, wide-mouth pint jars, or heatproof mugs of about 2-cup capacity, buttered and filled two-thirds full to leave room for rise. Cover each tightly with buttered foil or a pleated cloth tied down, or steam will condense into the batter.
- Steaming, not bakingThe moulds sit on a rack in a covered pot with water halfway up their sides, at a bare simmer for three hours. The water must never boil dry and never boil hard enough to slop over the covers; top up with boiling water as needed.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard kidney fat, grated or ground fine, and it is what makes the crumb open and moist rather than greasy. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Butter is offered as the alternative in the original; if you take it, leave out the tablespoon of salt, exactly as the recipe says.
- Cherries and citronBoth mean candied fruit, not fresh. Candied cherries and candied citron peel; rinse off surplus syrup and dry them, or the batter turns sticky and the fruit sinks.
- That tablespoon of saltIt looks alarming in a sweet pudding but is correct for a batter weighing over ten pounds, and only when unsalted suet is the fat.
- The sauceNo brown sugar sauce recipe is given here. Any standard version works: brown sugar and butter cooked to a syrup, thinned with sherry or Madeira and finished off the heat.
- Yield and keepingEight puddings, each serving four to six. Steamed puddings improve after a week or two wrapped and stored cool; reheat by steaming a further 45 to 60 minutes before serving.
Plum pudding kept its name long after the plums left it. Medieval and early modern "plum" meant any dried fruit, and by the eighteenth century the dish had settled into the boiled, suet-bound, fruit-heavy pudding that became fixed to Christmas dinner in Victorian Britain and travelled with it to American tables. Mrs. Wilson's version is a distinctly American recipe: molasses instead of treacle, pecans among the almonds, baking powder as insurance, and the batter divided among salvaged one-pound baking powder tins rather than a single cloth-tied basin. Wilson was writing as a household economist for a Philadelphia newspaper audience, and the reuse of tins is characteristic of her thrift.