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Steamed Fruit Pudding. Pound Fruit Pudding
14 ounces of butter. 12 ounces of sugar. 11 eggs. 1 pound of flour. 1 teaspoonful of mixed ground spices. 1 lemon, juice and grated rind. 1/2 cup of brandy. 1 pound of raisins. 1 pound of currants. 1/2 pound of citron. The first four articles are to be mixed first, as usual for cake, then the others added, not forgetting to dust the fruit well with flour. It is one of the most satisfactory puddings to make for hotel use; being really a good plum pudding to replace the boiled, which requires twice as much time, Steam these fully 3 hours; longer if in large moulds.
A hotel-scale plum pudding built on a pound-cake base rather than the older suet-and-breadcrumb formula. Everything is by weight, and the weights matter more than the volumes.
- Weigh, don't measure14 oz butter is about 3 1/2 sticks; 12 oz sugar is roughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups; 1 lb flour is about 3 1/2 cups scooped and levelled. Eleven eggs is somewhere around 1 lb 3 oz of shelled egg, or about two cups.
- No leavening, by designThere is no baking powder or soda here. The lift comes entirely from air beaten into the butter and sugar and from the eggs, so cream the first two until genuinely pale and light, and add the eggs a little at a time to keep the batter from breaking.
- Mixed ground spicesThis is generally the old pudding-spice sort of blend: cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice, and often mace or ginger. A teaspoonful across something near seven pounds of batter is restrained; two or three is closer to modern taste.
- Currants and citronCurrants means dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Citron is candied citron peel, sold at holidays or by mail; candied orange and lemon peel substitute directly.
- Dusting the fruitThe instruction not to forget this is the hinge. Two and a half pounds of fruit in a stiff batter will sink and clump unless each piece is coated in flour. The recipe does not say whether that flour is reserved from the pound weighed out or taken in addition to it.
- Setting up the steamerButter the moulds well, fill them no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil tied down, or the condensate will waterlog the top. Keep the water at a bare simmer halfway up the moulds and top it up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry over three hours.
- Judging donenessThe recipe gives three hours and says longer for large moulds without saying how much longer; expect to add substantially to the time for a big mould. A skewer should come out clean.
- Yield and keepingThe batter runs to something under seven pounds, enough for a couple of dozen or so hotel portions. Wrapped and refrigerated it will keep for some days; re-steam 45 minutes to an hour before serving, with hard sauce or a brandy sauce.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late-19th-century trade manuals written for men working hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than for housewives, and the reasoning here is pure commercial kitchen: a pudding that behaves like a plum pudding but is mixed "as usual for cake" and steams in three hours instead of boiling for six. Traditional English plum pudding was built on suet, breadcrumbs and a long boil, a method that tied up a stockpot for most of a day; this version swaps in a butter-and-egg pound cake batter, which the trade could turn out in quantity with the same equipment used for everything else in the pastry department. The fruit list, raisins, currants and citron, with brandy and mixed spice going into the batter, is the older tradition intact.