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English Christmas Plum Pudding
(Makes two puddings) 1½ cups flour, 1½ cups bread crumbs, 11/½ tsp. Royal baking powder, 1 lb. 2 oz. suet, 1½ lbs. raisins, 34 lb. currants, 1½ cups sugar (white), 3/4 lb. candied peel (mixed), 6 oz. almonds, 3 eggs, 1½ cups milk, salt and spices to taste. Chop the suet, peel, almonds and raisins, mix with dry ingredients, and stir in milk and eggs beaten together. Put into a bowl, tie tight in a cloth, tied at the bottom, boil eight hours. Be sure to have water boiling when you put the pudding in. Leave tied in the cloth until ready to use (they will keep for a year); then heat in boiling water. Serve with a hard sauce.
— Mrs. John T. Blaker
W. Auburn.
A full-sized boiled plum pudding of the old school: no butter, no chocolate, and no oven — the fat is beef suet and the cooking is eight hours in a cloth over water. The quantities below make two puddings of roughly two pounds each, enough for twelve to sixteen servings apiece.
- The measurementsRead the fractions as halves and quarters: 1½ cups flour, 1½ cups breadcrumbs, 1½ teaspoons baking powder, 1½ lb raisins, ¾ lb currants, 1½ cups sugar. The currants are ¾ lb, not 34 lb.
- Suet1 lb 2 oz of beef suet is the traditional fat, bought from a butcher and chopped or grated fine while cold. Packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) substitutes weight for weight; regular butter or shortening will not give the same open, moist crumb.
- BreadcrumbsThese should be soft fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dry commercial crumbs, which will absorb far more liquid and give a dense pudding.
- Candied peel and almonds"Mixed peel" means candied orange, lemon and citron. Chop it and the almonds (blanched, sweet almonds) by hand rather than in a processor, or the mixture turns to paste.
- Spices"Salt and spices to taste" leaves the blend to the cook. A workable modern starting point for this quantity would be about a teaspoon of salt with roughly 2 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp each nutmeg and allspice, ½ tsp cloves and ½ tsp mace, but the recipe specifies none of this.
- Tying the clothScald the pudding cloth, wring it out, and flour the inside heavily before lining the bowl — the flour paste is what seals the surface and keeps water out. A modern alternative is a buttered pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil, tied under the rim.
- The boilThe water must be at a rolling boil before the pudding goes in, and must never stop boiling or drop below the level of the pudding. Keep a kettle going and top up with boiling water only; cold water will make the pudding heavy.
- Keeping itThe claim that it keeps a year assumes a cold larder and a pudding rich in sugar and fat, left sealed in its cloth. Modern practice is to store it wrapped and refrigerated, or frozen, and to reheat by steaming for one to two hours.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and icing sugar, flavoured with brandy, rum or vanilla, chilled firm and served in a lump on the hot pudding.
Boiled plum pudding descends from a medieval pottage of meat, dried fruit and spice that gradually shed its meat and kept its suet; "plum" was long used to mean raisin or prune, which is why there is no plum in it. By the nineteenth century the cloth-boiled, spirit-preserved Christmas pudding was fixed as the English festive dish, and Dickens gave it a permanent place in the popular imagination. Its appearance in a North American community cookbook, signed by a contributor apparently from West Auburn, is typical of the genre: these books collected the dishes women were known for, and an eight-hour English pudding that could be made weeks ahead and kept in its cloth was exactly the kind of contribution that carried a name with it.