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Baked Plum Pudding
870. Plum Pudding without Eggs. -Mix together half a pound of bread, four ounces of suet, four ounces of treacle or sugar, a dessertspoonful of honey-water, and half a pound of currants, with a little milk. Boil it three or four hours. 871. A Plain Plum Pudding. -Well mix a large breakfast-cupful of bread-crumbs, the same quantity of flour, the same of finelychopped beef suet, two eggs well beaten, a cupful of sugar, a little ginger, grated nutmeg and candied peel, a quarter of a pound of currants, half a pound of raisins, two spoonsful of treacle made warm in a little milk. Boil it four hours.
Another Plain Plum Pudding. - Mix a pound of grated bread, half a pound of currants when cleaned, half a pound of raisins when stoned , half a pound of suet, two ounces of candied peel, four eggs, some sugar, a glass of wine or brandy, a little nutmeg, and a teacupful of milk; put it in a basin, and boil it four hours. 872. A Richer Plum Pudding. -Mix together one pound each of plums, currants, moist sugar, suet, and bread-crumbs, four ounces of flour, and four eggs well beaten ; add mixed spice and candied peel to the taste, with a spoonful of brandy and sherry. Boil four hours. 873. A Rich Plum Pudding. Mix together half a pound of grated bread, half a pound of beef suet chopped fine, half a pound of currants, half a pound of apples chopped fine, seven yolks of eggs well beaten, two or three spoonsful of brandy and a little sherry; sugar and salt to the taste. Let it boil four hours at least. The sauce should be red wine, sugar, and butter. 874. A very Rich and Excellent Plum Pudding.-Beat eight eggs and mix them with a pint of good cream, half a pound of flour , and half a pound of crumb of bread; beat them well together, and put to them one pound of beef suet chopped very fine, one pound of currants, one pound of jar raisins stoned and chopped small, one pound of powdered sugar, two ounces of candied orange-peel, and the same of citron. Grate a nutmeg, and mix all well together with half a pint of brandy and wine; put it in a cloth, and tie it up close . It will take six hours to boil. 875. Mock Plum Pudding.-Add to half a pound of flour half a pound of treacle, and half a pound of suet. Mix them together , and boil for six hours. 876. Baked Plum Pudding. - Take half a pound of suet chopped fine, eight or ten ounces of plums stoned and cut in halves, half a pound of bread-crumbs scalded with half a pint of boiling milk ; add two or three well-beaten eggs, a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, and a little lemon peel or nutmeg. Mix, and bake full an hour and a half in a slow oven. Turn it out of the pie-dish, and serve either cold or hot. 877. Add to one quarter of a pound of grated bread crumbs five and a half ounces of finely chopped suet, and about six ounces of moist sugar, then beat two eggs and put them to the above, adding just enough of cold milk to make the pudding of a proper consistency. Boil it full four hours, and, if approved, it may be served with wine sauce.
The baked version (876) is the shortest route into this family of puddings: no cloth, no long boil, just a pie-dish and a low oven. A few of the terms have shifted since, and the surrounding boiled recipes on the same page use the same vocabulary.
- A slow ovenRead this as 300F (150C). The pudding is essentially a rich bread custard bound with suet, and it wants to set gently over the full 90 minutes rather than brown. Cover loosely with foil if the top colours before the centre is firm.
- "Plums" are not plumsIn a plum pudding the word means dried fruit, and here almost certainly large raisins or prunes; "stoned and cut in halves" points to prunes or muscatels. Eight to ten ounces is 225-285 g. Ordinary seedless raisins work, with no stoning needed.
- SuetHalf a pound is 225 g. Fresh beef suet from a butcher gives the best texture; packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetable, is the practical substitute and needs no chopping. Butter is not a straight swap here, as the pudding relies on suet melting slowly to keep the crumb open.
- Moist sugarThis is unrefined soft brown sugar. Light or dark muscovado is the closest thing on a modern shelf; a quarter of a pound is about 115 g, or half a cup packed.
- Scalding the crumbsThe hinge of the recipe. Pour the half pint (roughly 285 ml, or 1 1/4 cups) of boiling milk over the 225 g of crumbs and let it stand until cool enough to touch before the eggs go in, or they will scramble and the pudding will be grainy.
- Treacle and jar raisins, in the neighbouring recipesTreacle is dark molasses, not golden syrup. "Jar raisins" were plump dessert raisins sold in jars, best replaced by large muscatels or Lexia raisins. The "honey-water" in 870 is not a standard measure and cannot be reliably converted; a dessertspoon of thin honey is the sensible reading.
- Yield and servingThe baked pudding suits a pie dish of roughly 1.5 litres and will serve six or so. Turn it out onto a plate while still warm, since it sets firmly as it cools. The sauce given at 873, red wine with sugar and butter, suits it as well as it suits the boiled versions.
Plum pudding began as a boiled or steamed dish, tied in a floured cloth and hung in a copper for hours, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become closely bound up with Christmas; a number of English cookery books gave it a run of variants graded by expense, as this page does: without eggs, plain, richer, rich, very rich, and mock. The baked version belongs to the cheaper end of that ladder in practice if not in name, since it dispenses with the cloth, the pudding basin and the long watch over a boiling pot, and it would suit a household that already had a range with oven space. The word plum had meant raisin or dried fruit in English kitchens since well before these books were printed, which is why no plums appear in the ingredients; "mock" plum pudding, with no fruit and no eggs at all, shows how far down the scale the name could stretch.