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Christmas Pudding
Separate the yolks of six eggs from the whites. Take two breakfast cupfuls of rich mincemeat, put into it the yolks of six eggs and beat them well with it for four or five minutes; whip the whites to a froth, and have ready six ounces of flour. Add to the pudding first a little flour and then a little beaten white of egg, and so on alternately until both flour and eggs are used up, beating each addition well in. Butter the inside of a good-sized mould and put the pudding into it, giving it room to swell; cover firmly, plunge it into boiling water, and keep boiling rapidly for five hours.
A steamed pudding of unusual economy: mincemeat, eggs and flour, with no sugar, crumbs or added fat beyond what the mincemeat carries. Everything depends on the mincemeat being rich and on the mould staying watertight for five hours.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup in this period runs 8 to 10 fluid ounces, larger than a teacup. Two of them is a generous pint of mincemeat, roughly 1 lb 4 oz by weight.
- Six ounces of flourWeigh it rather than scooping: 6 oz is about 1 1/3 cups of all-purpose flour. There is no leavening here, so an extra ounce will show up as a heavy pudding.
- The mincemeat is the recipeNineteenth-century mincemeat commonly meant chopped beef or tongue with beef suet, apples, raisins, currants, spices, sugar and spirits. Most commercial jarred mincemeat today is meatless, often wetter and sweeter, though many brands still carry suet; if you use it, drain it well and expect a softer, sweeter pudding. Suet-based mincemeat supplies the fat this batter otherwise lacks.
- Folding, not beatingThe instruction to beat each addition well in fights the whipped whites, which are the only lift in the pudding. Beat the yolks into the mincemeat as directed, then fold flour and whites in alternately with a light hand.
- Covering the mould"Cover firmly" means a lid tied down, or a double layer of buttered parchment and foil pleated across the top and tied under the rim with string. Water in the batter turns the pudding gluey.
- Boiling water and topping upStand the mould on a trivet or folded cloth in the pot, with boiling water reaching two-thirds up the sides, and add more boiling water as it falls. A rolling boil for five hours will empty a pot; going dry cracks the mould and scorches the pudding. A steady simmer works as well and is safer for the vessel.
- Doneness and yieldFive hours suits a mould of about 1 1/2 quarts; the recipe's own instruction to allow room to swell rules out anything much smaller, and a smaller basin will need proportionately less time. A skewer to the centre should come out clean and hot. It should serve eight or so.
- ServingRest ten minutes before unmoulding, then serve hot with hard sauce, brandy butter or a warm custard. It reheats by steaming for an hour and keeps, wrapped and chilled, for a week.
Boiled and steamed puddings in a cloth or mould are the older English form of the Christmas pudding, and mincemeat containing beef and suet was still common when Oscar Tschirky was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf in the 1890s. A pudding built on two cupfuls of mincemeat, six eggs and a little flour would have been an easy way to use a quantity of mincemeat already made up, though the recipe itself says nothing about where the mincemeat came from. The gradual disappearance of meat from mincemeat over the twentieth century is why a modern jar behaves differently from the one Oscar's cooks would have reached for.