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Festive Occasion
1180. Mix three-quarters of a peck of flour, six large loaves, eight pounds of suet, six pounds of raisins, six pounds of currants, ten eggs, three pounds of brown sugar, one ounce of allspice, a quart of old ale, a bottle of raisin wine, and milk enough to make it of a proper consistence. Whether made into two puddings or more, it should be boiled for full twenty hours; if made some little time previously, it may be hung up in a dry place, and if boiled again a few hours before serving it will be all the better.
This is a plum pudding built on a parish scale — the quantities would fill a copper and feed a hall, not a family. Everything below assumes you will divide the amounts before you begin.
- Scale firstAs written this runs to well over 60 lb of raw mixture once the bread is counted. A tenth of the recipe -- roughly 1 lb flour, 12 oz suet, 10 oz each raisins and currants, 1 egg, 5 oz brown sugar, together with a tenth of the bread, ale and wine -- still gives a very substantial pudding, several pounds in weight.
- Three-quarters of a peck of flourA peck is eight dry quarts, which for flour was commonly reckoned at about 14 lb; three-quarters of that is roughly 10 to 11 lb depending on how it is scooped.
- "Six large loaves"This means bread, most likely stale and grated to crumbs, a common bulking agent in puddings of this size. If a large loaf is taken as the quartern loaf of roughly 4 lb, six of them is a very large amount of crumb; the original gives no clearer measure, so work by feel and add crumbs until the mixture holds its shape.
- SuetBeef suet, shredded fine. Packaged shredded suet works directly; a solid piece from a butcher should be stripped of membrane and grated from frozen.
- Old ale and raisin wineOld ale is a strong, matured dark ale — a barley wine or strong brown ale is the nearest thing. Raisin wine was a home-brewed sweet fruit wine; sweet sherry, Madeira or a dark cream sherry stands in for it.
- Ten eggs is deliberateFor this bulk the egg content is very low. The pudding is bound by suet, crumb and long boiling rather than custard, so do not expect a batter — the mixture should be stiff enough to stand in a spoon, and milk is added only to bring it to that point.
- Twenty hours of boilingPuddings this large genuinely need it, in cloths or covered basins standing on a trivet in a deep pan. The water must stay at a bare simmer and be topped up from a kettle of boiling water; if it drops below the pudding, the exposed part cooks dry and the whole thing is spoiled. A 3 lb pudding at domestic scale wants 6 to 8 hours.
- Storing and reboilingHanging in a dry, cool, airy place relies on sugar, alcohol and fat as preservatives, and on a cold larder. A modern kitchen is warmer; wrap in fresh parchment and cloth and keep it refrigerated. The final reboil of two to three hours before serving is what gives the dark, set texture, and is worth doing.