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Real English Christmas Plum Pudding
1/2 lb. currants 1/2 lb. raisins 1/2 lb. suet 1/2 lb. sugar 1/2 lb. apples 1/4 lb. carrots 1/2 lb. whole wheat bread crumbs 1/2 lb. flour 2 eggs well beaten 1 oz. candied lemon peel. a little citron, Slade's nutmeg and salt Mix all together with a little milk, tie in cloth and boil six hours. Serve with hard sauce.
— Mrs. James Tattersall
A plain boiled suet pudding of the traditional type, mixed by weight rather than volume. The measurements are unusually consistent — nearly everything is a half pound — so a kitchen scale does the whole job.
- The cloth is the whole techniqueScald the cloth, wring it out, then rub it generously with butter and dust it with flour before filling. The flour sets into a skin against the wet cloth and keeps water out of the pudding. Tie it loosely enough to allow the mixture to swell by about a third, and lower it into water already at a full boil.
- Keep the water upOver six hours the pot will drop a great deal of water. Top it up with boiling water — never cold, which stalls the cooking and can make the pudding heavy — and keep the pudding off the bottom of the pot on a trivet, plate or folded cloth.
- A basin works as wellThis kind of mixture can also be steamed in a buttered 2-quart pudding basin, covered with pleated parchment and foil and tied down, sitting in a covered pot of simmering water. Same six hours, less anxiety about leaks.
- Slade's nutmegSlade's was a Boston spice house; the brand name here simply means ground nutmeg. Half a teaspoon suits this quantity. Some other versions of the pudding add cinnamon, cloves or mace, though this one does not.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded in some markets and available from butchers on request. Grate or process it cold and toss it with a spoonful of the flour so it stays in separate flakes. Packaged shredded suet, vegetable or beef, substitutes directly.
- Apples and carrotsBoth are best peeled and grated rather than chopped, since they are there for moisture and sweetness rather than texture. The carrot is a long-standing thrift ingredient in English puddings and tends to disappear into the finished dish.
- Raisins and citronThe half pound of raisins is most likely the large dark table raisin; stone them if using muscatels. Candied citron is still sold at holidays, though candied orange peel is an easy stand-in.
- Yield and keepingThe mixture comes to roughly four and a half to five pounds and serves ten to twelve in the small wedges this pudding wants. It keeps for weeks wrapped and refrigerated, and improves for it; reheat by steaming an hour to ninety minutes.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and flavored with brandy or vanilla, chilled firm. Figure a half cup of butter to a cup and a half of sugar, and serve it cold against the hot pudding.
Boiled plum pudding descends from the medieval and early modern pottage — meat, dried fruit, breadcrumbs and spice boiled together — which lost its meat and gained its cloth over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leaving suet as the last trace of the original. "Plum" is an older English word for dried fruit, and particularly the raisin, which is why there are no plums in it. Its firm attachment to Christmas is usually traced to the Victorians, and by the time this cookbook was collected the flaming pudding was a fixture of the English-speaking holiday table on both sides of the Atlantic. That a Philathea class — the Bible-class movement for young women, whose local chapters produced fundraising books of this kind in the early twentieth century — printed it under a contributor's name and called it "real English" says something about how such recipes traveled: as personal property, vouched for by the woman who brought it.