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Christmas Plum Pudding
2 cups ground suet 2 cups bread crumbs 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 2 cups sugar 2 cups seeded raisins 2 cups currants 1 cup finely cut citron 1 cup finely cut figs 1 tablespoon finely cut orange peel 1 tablespoon finely cut lemon peel 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground ginger 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon ground mace 1 tablespoon salt 1 cup water 1 cup grape or other fruit juice Mix thoroughly all dry ingredients and add fruit; stir in water and fruit juice and mix thoroughly. Add a little more water if necessary to make stiff dough. Fill greased molds 2/3 full, and steam five or six hours. This pudding should be prepared and cooked a week or more before it is to be used. Before serving steam one hour and serve with hard, lemon or foamy sauce (below).
A very large steamed pudding — the quantities fill two to three quart molds and will serve 16 to 20. Everything hinges on keeping the steamer at a steady simmer with water topped up; if it boils dry the pudding scorches and the mold can crack.
- That tablespoon of saltA tablespoon of salt reads high beside two cups of sugar, though the batch is very large (some fourteen cups of dry ingredients), so it may be as printed rather than a slip for a teaspoon. Cooks wary of it can reduce to a teaspoon or two.
- Suet"Ground suet" is raw beef kidney fat, put through a grinder rather than melted. A butcher will still supply it, and shredded packaged suet is sold for puddings; frozen suet grates more easily than fresh. Two cups is roughly 8 oz by weight.
- Currants, not red currantsThese are dried Zante currants — small black raisins — not the fresh berry. Substituting fresh fruit adds water and ruins the texture.
- CitronCandied citron peel is still made but is often sold only near Christmas. Candied lemon or mixed peel is the usual stand-in; the tablespoons of orange and lemon peel here also mean candied peel, not zest.
- Baking powder in a plum puddingTraditional English puddings rely on eggs and long steaming alone. The two teaspoons of Royal Baking Powder are the point of the book — this is a promotional volume — and they give a lighter, more cake-like crumb than a classic dense pudding. Note there are no eggs at all, which is unusual and makes the leavening necessary.
- Molds and fillingGrease well and fill only two-thirds so the pudding can rise. Cover the top with greased parchment and foil, or a floured cloth tied down, otherwise condensation soaks the surface. Any lidded pudding basin, coffee can or heatproof bowl works if it is covered.
- SteamingSet the molds on a rack in a large pot with boiling water reaching halfway up their sides, lid on, water at a bare simmer for five to six hours. Check and replenish with boiling water every hour.
- Storing and reheatingCool completely, re-cover, and keep in the refrigerator rather than a modern warm pantry; a week ahead is the minimum the recipe asks for and a month improves it. Steam one hour to reheat before serving.
Plum pudding lost its plums long ago — "plum" was a general English word for dried fruit, and by the eighteenth century the boiled pudding was made with raisins and currants bound in suet. Its fixed place on the Christmas table is often traced to Victorian England and was firmly established by the time Dickens set a flaming pudding before the Cratchits in 1843. What is interesting about this version is the company it keeps: it comes from a baking-powder manufacturer's promotional cookbook, and so a dish that traditionally depends on eggs, suet and hours of steam for its structure has been given two teaspoons of Royal Baking Powder and no eggs at all. American cookbooks of the period routinely nudged inherited British recipes toward chemical leavening, which was cheaper, more reliable and, not incidentally, the product being advertised.