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English Plum Pudding
This recipe makes one large, or several small puddings: One pound of finely chopped suet; one pound of stoned and halved raisins; one pound of curants; one pound of sultanas; one pound chopped mixed peel; one-half pound of flour; one-half pound bread crumbs; one full teaspoon of mixed spices; one pound of brown sugar or one and one-half pounds of granulated sugar; eight eggs, well beaten; one wine-glass of brandy (if liked). Flour the fruit before using. Mix all together adding the eggs and brandy last. Stir thoroughly over and over again before putting into the pudding cloths or molds and boil ten hours if in one pudding, and seven hours if in smaller sizes.
A full Victorian-scale Christmas pudding: roughly six pounds of fruit and suet bound with barely a pound of flour and crumbs. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities, the vessel and the ten-hour boil all need translating.
- Keep the water boilingThe single thing that ruins a boiled pudding is letting the pot go off the boil or run dry. Keep the water at a steady simmer for the whole time and top up only with boiling water from a kettle, never cold, and never let the level drop below the top of the cloth or basin.
- Scale and yieldThe mix comes to around 8 lb before cooking and will serve twenty-five or more in the slim wedges these puddings are cut into. Divide it among three or four 1-quart pudding basins unless you genuinely want one enormous pudding; the seven-hour timing applies to the smaller sizes.
- A wine-glassIn period usage a wine-glass is about 2 fl oz, so a scant quarter cup of brandy. It flavours rather than preserves at this quantity.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys. Ask a butcher, or buy packaged shredded suet, which is already floured and needs no chopping. Frozen block suet grates far more easily than fresh. Vegetable suet substitutes work, with a slightly softer set.
- Mixed peel and mixed spiceMixed peel is candied orange and lemon (and traditionally citron) rind. Mixed spice is a British blend leaning on cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves and mace; pumpkin-pie spice is the nearest supermarket equivalent. One teaspoon across four pounds of fruit and peel is unusually restrained by current taste, and two or three is defensible.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from stale but not dried bread, rubbed by hand or pulsed briefly. Dry packaged crumbs absorb differently and give a tighter, sandier pudding.
- Flouring the fruitTossing the raisins, currants and sultanas in some of the weighed flour keeps them suspended rather than sinking through the batter during the long cook. Take the flour from the half pound already listed, not in addition.
- Cloth or basinFor a cloth: scald it, wring it out, spread it and rub flour thickly into the damp surface before filling and tying, leaving room to swell. For basins: butter well, fill to about an inch below the rim, and cover with pleated parchment and foil tied under the lip so no water gets in. Stand basins on a trivet or folded cloth, not the bare pot bottom.
- Keeping and reheatingCool completely, re-wrap dry, and store somewhere cool; a pudding this rich keeps for weeks to months and is generally thought better for it. Reheat by steaming for about two hours before serving, with hard sauce or brandy butter.
Plum pudding descends from medieval and Tudor pottages in which meat, suet, dried fruit and spice were boiled together; "plum" meant raisin or prune long before it meant the fresh fruit, and it kept that sense in the pudding's name after the meat had dropped away. The pudding cloth, which appears in English cookery from the seventeenth century, freed the dish from an animal's stomach or gut casing and made it a domestic staple rather than a butcher's project. By the time The Butterick Cook Book was published in 1911, the pudding was firmly a Christmas institution on both sides of the Atlantic, and American cookbooks reproduced it as an English set piece, complete with the enormous single-pudding option that assumes a household with a large kettle and a long free day. The all-day boil is not fussiness: a mass this dense heats slowly, and the extended cooking darkens the sugar and melds the fruit, which is why puddings were traditionally made weeks ahead and reheated on the day.