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English Plum Pudding
1 pound chopped suet 2 pounds raisins 1 pound currants 1 pound mixed peel 2 cups flour 2 cups crums 1 teaspoon mixed spices 2 cups brown sugar 8 eggs Mix the suet, the fruit and the chopped peel and dredge with some of the flour. Mix together the remaining flour, crums, spices and sugar, and add the well-beaten eggs. Stir the fruit and suet into this mixture and mix the whole thoroughly. Put into greased molds or into pudding cloths. Drop into a kettle of boiling water and boil from five to seven hours, according to the size of the pudding. Serve with hard sauce or any desired liquid sauce.
A full-sized Victorian-style boiled pudding: about seven pounds of fruit and suet held together with crumbs, flour and eggs. Nothing here is difficult, but the scale, the steam and the keeping are all worth planning for.
- The hinge: keep the water boiling and topped upThe pudding cooks by steam and simmering water for five to seven hours, and the pot must never go dry or drop off the boil. Keep a kettle of boiling water alongside and replenish from that, never with cold water, which stalls the cooking and can make the pudding heavy.
- "Crums"Dry white breadcrumbs, grated from stale crustless bread, not the toasted golden crumbs sold for coating. They lighten the pudding; flour alone would make it close and heavy.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded or grated fine. Packaged shredded suet works directly; a butcher's block suet should be chilled hard and grated, and if you substitute frozen grated butter the texture will be softer and less traditionally crumbly.
- Mixed peel and mixed spiceMixed peel is candied citron, orange and lemon peel. "Mixed spices" in a British-style pudding means the blend sold as mixed spice: mostly cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and clove. One teaspoon across this quantity is restrained, and you may want more.
- No added liquidThe eight eggs are the only added moisture, so the mixture will be very stiff. Other period recipes for such puddings often slacken the mixture with milk, stout, brandy or a mixture until it drops reluctantly from the spoon; this one does not, but you can add a few tablespoons at a time if it will not come together.
- Molds and clothsGrease the basins well and fill only two-thirds full, then cover with pleated parchment and foil tied under the rim so no water gets in. If using a cloth, scald it, flour the inside heavily, and tie it loosely enough for the pudding to swell. Stand basins on a rack or folded cloth rather than directly on the pot bottom.
- Yield and dividingThis makes roughly seven to eight pounds of pudding, enough for twenty or more servings. Divide it among two or three basins; smaller puddings need nearer five hours, a single large one nearer seven.
- Keeping and reheatingBoiled puddings improve with age. Cool completely, re-cover with fresh parchment, and store somewhere cold; reheat by steaming one to two hours before serving.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and sugar, usually with brandy or rum, served cold so it melts over the hot pudding. Brandy butter is the same thing under its British name.
"Plum" in this context means raisin, a survival from the days when any dried fruit was a plum, and the dish descends from the spiced, fruited meat puddings and pottages of medieval and early modern England. By the nineteenth century the meat had gone, leaving suet as the only trace, and the pudding had attached itself firmly to Christmas — a fixture reinforced by Dickens and by the Victorian habit of making the puddings weeks ahead so they could mature. Its "English" label points to a British model; the long boil and the pudding cloth also belong to an older kitchen, where a pot over the fire was more dependable than an oven.