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English Plum Pudding
6 eggs beaten very light. 2 cups brown sugar. 3/4 lbs. beef suet or butter. 1/4 lb. bread crumbs. 3/4 lb. flour. 1/2 cup sweet milk. 1/2 cup brandy or whiskey. Dissolve in brandy-- 1/4 teaspoon cloves. 2 teaspoons cinnamon. 1 teaspoon nutmeg. 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice. To this add-- 1 lb. Sultana raisins. 1 lb. seeded raisins. 1 lb. currants. 1/2 lb. pecans. 1 lb. home-made citron, orange paste, pineapple and chrries.
Mix all well, put in well-greased quart buckets, steam three or four hours. Serve with sauce.
A full Christmas pudding on the old scale: this is a batch recipe, not a single mould, and the proportions of fruit to batter tell you it is meant to be made ahead and kept. A few conventions need translating.
- YieldThe mix weighs roughly eight pounds and will fill five or six quart moulds filled two-thirds, fewer if packed fuller. Halve or quarter it freely; nothing in the method depends on the batch size.
- Quart bucketsProbably tin pails of the lard or syrup sort. Any quart pudding basin, straight-sided tin, or heatproof bowl works. Grease well, fill no more than two-thirds, and cover with greased parchment plus foil tied down, or the condensate will waterlog the top.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard kidney fat and gives the pudding its open, light crumb; butter makes a denser, cakier result. Fresh suet must be grated cold and the membrane picked out. Packaged shredded suet is easier to find in Britain than in the US; ask a butcher, or freeze the block and grate it.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh milk, specified only to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes often called for.
- Home-made citron, orange paste, pineapple and cherriesThat pound is candied fruit, made at home by simmering peel and fruit in heavy syrup. Bought mixed candied peel and glacé cherries substitute directly. Steer away from the neon-red cherries sold for cocktails.
- SteamingA covered pot with a rack, water halfway up the moulds, kept at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water; if the pot runs dry the pudding scorches and the mould can crack. Three hours suits a quart mould, four does no harm.
- What is missingThere is no salt and no leavening. A half teaspoon of salt per batch is worth adding; the pudding needs no baking powder, since the steam and the beaten eggs do the lifting.
- Keeping and reheatingCool completely, re-cover, and store cold. These puddings improve over weeks and are traditionally fed with a spoonful of brandy now and then. Steam again for an hour to an hour and a half before serving.
- SauceThe recipe assumes you know which one. Hard sauce (creamed butter and powdered sugar with brandy) is the standard partner; a warm foamy egg sauce is the other.
Plum pudding kept its name long after the plums left it: in medieval and early modern English usage "plum" meant any dried fruit, and by the eighteenth century the dish had shifted from a spiced meat-and-fruit pottage to a sweet suet pudding boiled in a cloth. The suet, the brandy, the pound-at-a-time fruit and the long steam are all holdovers from a preserving logic — a pudding built to survive weeks in a cool larder and be reheated for the feast. A recipe on this scale is a deliberate holiday extravagance, and it appears here, oddly, under "Vegetables."