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English Boiled Plum Pudding
3 pounds of flour. 2 pounds of chopped suet. 2 pounds of seedless raisins. 1 1/2 pounds of currants. 1 pound of citron. 2 ounces of mixed ground spices--cinnamon, mace, nutmeg and cloves.
Mix all the above dry articles together in a pan. Then mix the following fluids: 1 1/2 pints of milk. 1/2 cup of black molasses, large measure. 8 eggs. 1 pound of common yellow sugar. 1/2 pint of brandy. 1 teaspoonful of salt. Then stir both mixtures together. This should be prepared over night, and next morning tied up in four or five pudding cloths and boiled without intermission six hours.
Some persons have hardly a speck of reverence for the antique, and had as lief add something to the time-honored English plum pudding as not, if they find it makes it lighter, more enjoyable and more digestible. Such people can add to the preceding receipts two pounds or less of fine white bread crumbs, and to the fluid part a half pint more milk. That is all, but it makes a difference. The quantity of pudding prescribed is enough for 100 to 150 persons--that is to say, of persons having hotel dinners to eat besides. The addition of molasses to the preceding, and other puddings to come, is for the purpose of giving with the spices a dark color, but when refined syrups only can be had burnt sugar must be added for coloring. Not only cooks but many others like-wise ought to feel grateful to Count Albufage Caramel, of Nismes, who invented caramel. It is used for giving a brown color to an immense number of eatable and drinkable articles, and is not only harmless, but gives an agreeable flavor in some cases, as in creams. Put some sugar in a frying pan over the fire, let it burn darker than browned coffee, then fill up the pan with water, boil and strain.
But there is another plum pudding, called in French bills-of fare pouding a l' Allemande, which all who practice it will prefer to make nine times to the preceding kind once. It contains no flour, and can be boiled in half the time of Christmas pudding.
This is a hotel-scale Christmas pudding: the full batch is roughly twenty pounds of raw mixture, divided among four or five cloths. Scaling it down by eight or ten gives one family-sized pudding, and everything else follows from that.
- Scale firstAt one-eighth of the recipe you get about 6 oz flour, 4 oz suet, 4 oz raisins, 3 oz currants, 2 oz citron, 1 egg, 2 oz sugar, and roughly 1/3 cup milk with a tablespoon of molasses and two tablespoons of brandy. That fills about a 1-quart basin.
- The hinge: the water must never stop boiling"Boiled without intermission" is the whole instruction. If the pot goes off the boil or runs dry, the pudding stops setting and turns dense and gluey in the centre. Keep a kettle of boiling water alongside and top up from it, never with cold.
- Cloth or basinA pudding cloth wants scalding, wringing out, and flouring heavily before the mixture goes in; leave room for swelling and tie tightly. A greased pudding basin with pleated parchment and foil, in a covered pot with water halfway up the sides, is far easier and handles the same six hours as a gentle steam.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher, chopped or grated fine and tossed with a little of the flour so it does not clump. Packet shredded suet works directly. Frozen suet grates much more easily than fresh.
- "Common yellow sugar"An unrefined or partly refined cane sugar of the period; light brown or raw sugar is the nearest thing. The molasses is there for colour as much as flavour, and blackstrap will taste harsh at this proportion — use ordinary dark molasses or treacle.
- Currants and citronCurrants here are dried Zante grapes, not fresh redcurrants. Citron is candied citron peel, sold in blocks; chop it small, and candied orange and lemon peel can stand in for part of it.
- Two ounces of spiceTwo ounces across the full batch works out at about a quarter-ounce, roughly a tablespoon, of mixed cinnamon, mace, nutmeg and cloves for a single scaled-down pudding. Grate the nutmeg fresh and go light on the cloves.
- The breadcrumb versionThe suggested addition of bread crumbs plus extra milk is worth taking: it lightens a mixture that is otherwise very heavy in flour, and it is closer to the standard nineteenth-century English formula.
- Ambiguities"1/2 cup of black molasses, large measure" and the egg size are both loose. Eggs of the period were not graded and varied in size; the batter should be stiff enough to drop reluctantly from a spoon, and a splash more milk is the correction if it is not.
- Keeping and reheatingBoiled puddings improve after weeks or months wrapped and stored cool, thanks to the sugar, fat and brandy. Steam again for an hour or two before serving.
Boiled plum pudding reached its familiar form in eighteenth-century England, when an older savoury pottage of meat, dried fruit and spice shed the meat and kept the suet; "plum" still means dried fruit rather than any fresh plum. Its appearance in an American professional manual is a reminder that hotel kitchens of the period cooked to a broadly French-and-English repertoire, and that a chef needed quantities for a hundred and fifty covers, not for a household. The aside on colouring is practical trade advice: molasses darkened the pudding when it was to hand, and burnt-sugar caramel did the same job with refined syrups. The credit given to "Count Albufage Caramel, of Nismes" is kitchen folklore of the jokey sort, not documented history — caramelised sugar has no inventor, and the name appears to be built backwards from the word. The closing note about pouding à l'Allemande, a flourless pudding boiled in half the time, shows a working cook's preference for the version that turns out faster.