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English Plum Pudding
1 pound chopped suet
2 cups crums
2 pounds raisins
1 teaspoon mixed spices
1 pound currants
2 cups brown sugar
1 pound mixed peel
8 eggs
2 cups flour
Mix the suet, the fruit and the chopped peel and dredge with some of the flour. Mix together the remaining flour, crums, spices and sugar, and add the well-beaten eggs. Stir the fruit and suet into this mixture and mix the whole thoroughly. Put into greased molds or into pudding cloths. Drop into a kettle of boiling water and boil from five to seven hours, according to the size of the pudding. Serve with hard sauce or any desired liquid sauce.
A full-sized Victorian boiled pudding: no liquid but eggs, no leavening, and the better part of a day at a simmer. The points below cover the vessels, the fruit and the one thing that ruins it.
- Keep the water boiling and topped upThis is the hinge. The pot must be kept at a steady rolling boil for the whole time, and any water added must be boiling — cold water stops the cooking and gives a heavy, sodden band through the middle. Set the mold on a trivet or a folded cloth so it does not rattle on the bottom, and check the level hourly.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; a butcher will supply it, and packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) is sold in British groceries. It should be chopped or grated fine, not creamed. Frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh.
- CrumsSoft white breadcrumbs from a day-old loaf, not dried or toasted crumbs. Two cups is roughly 4 oz. Dry packaged crumbs will absorb too much and tighten the pudding.
- Mixed peel and mixed spicesMixed peel is candied citron, orange and lemon rind, sold ready-chopped at holiday time. "Mixed spices" in a book of this date means a blend along the lines of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves and mace — a teaspoon for this quantity is restrained, and many modern recipes call for considerably more.
- Molds and clothsGrease a heatproof basin or pudding mold, fill it no more than three-quarters full to allow rise, and cover with pleated parchment and foil tied under the rim so no water enters. A pudding cloth should be scalded, floured and tied loosely enough to let the pudding swell.
- Steaming instead of boilingA covered basin set on a rack over two inches of simmering water is a common alternative and needs far less watching; allow at least the five to seven hours given. Refill the pan from a kettle.
- YieldThis makes a very large quantity: the suet and fruit alone weigh five pounds, and with the flour, sugar, crumbs and eggs the mixture is nearer eight. Divide it between several basins; smaller puddings need about five hours, one large one closer to seven.
- Keeping and reheatingBoiled puddings were made weeks ahead. Cool completely in the mold, re-cover with fresh parchment, and store cool and dry; reheat by steaming one to two hours before serving. Hard sauce is butter creamed with sugar and brandy or vanilla.
Plum pudding kept the medieval name long after the plums left it: "plums" meant dried fruit generally, and the dish descends from the spiced meat-and-fruit pottages that thickened over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a solid boiled pudding held together by suet, eggs and breadcrumbs. The pudding cloth, which made a free-standing round pudding possible without a mold, is generally credited with that transformation. By the Victorian period it was fixed as the Christmas dish Dickens helped establish, and made weeks in advance so the fruit and spice could mellow. Its appearance in a household book alongside such quantities of currants, raisins and candied peel says something about how thoroughly an English holiday ritual had been adopted by the early twentieth century, and about a period when a family might reasonably expect to eat a great deal of pudding over the course of a season.