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Plum Pudding-No. 2
One egg, half cup of sour milk, half cup molasses, half cup suet chopped fine, one cup seeded raisins, a large teaspoonful soda, flour to make a thick batter, half teaspoonful of all kinds of spices.
Steam three hours.
A small, thrifty steamed pudding of the sort that leaned on soda and sour milk rather than eggs and butter. The quantities are terse, so the two things to settle before starting are how much flour "a thick batter" means and how you will rig the steamer.
- Flour quantity"Thick batter" here means a stiff drop batter that holds its shape on the spoon but is not a dough. With a cup of liquid plus the egg that will take considerably more flour than the cup you might expect — likely in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 cups — but the recipe leaves the amount to judgement. Add it in stages; too much flour gives a dry, bready pudding.
- Sour milkThis meant naturally soured raw milk, not spoiled pasteurized milk. Use buttermilk, or stir 1 1/2 teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar into half a cup of whole milk and let it stand five minutes.
- The soda"A large teaspoonful" is generous — closer to 1 1/2 level teaspoons in modern measure. It is doing all the leavening, reacting with both the sour milk and the molasses, but the full amount risks a soapy, faintly metallic taste. A rounded teaspoon is the safer reading.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; ask a butcher, since supermarket trimmings are softer. Freeze it and grate, or chop it very fine, so it melts through the batter during steaming rather than pooling. Frozen grated butter works, though the crumb is less light.
- Spices"Half teaspoonful of all kinds of spices" is ambiguous: it may mean half a teaspoon of mixed spice in total, or half a teaspoon of each of the usual pudding spices — cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, ginger. If you read it as a total, weight the cinnamon and nutmeg and use cloves sparingly.
- Steaming setupButter a mold or pudding basin of at least 1 1/2 quarts and fill it no more than two-thirds; cover tightly with buttered foil or a tied cloth so condensation cannot drip in. Set it on a rack in a pot with boiling water halfway up the sides, keep the water at a bare simmer, and top it up with more boiling water as it drops.
- Three hoursThree hours suits a mold of about this size, and the pudding will not suffer for an extra fifteen minutes. In smaller cups it will be done sooner, perhaps in about half the time. A skewer to the center should come out clean, and the pudding should pull slightly from the sides.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. Turn it out hot and serve with a hard sauce or a thin vanilla or lemon sauce. It reheats well by steaming for 30 minutes.
Despite the name, this is not the great brandied Christmas plum pudding of English tradition but its American weekday descendant: no brandy, no candied peel, no long aging, and a single egg. "Plum" had meant raisin since well before these books were printed, a survival from the days when dried fruit of any kind was called a plum. Recipes like this one belong to the era of chemical leavening — the pairing of soda with sour milk and molasses, both acidic, gave lift without yeast or a great many eggs. Numbered versions of the same dish let a housekeeper pick according to what she had on hand; No. 2 is plainly the economical one.