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Christmas Plum Pudding
One quart seeded raisins, pint currants, half pint citron cut up, quart of apples peeled and chopped, a quart of fresh and nicely chopped beef-suet, a quart of sweet milk, a heaping quart of stale bread-crumbs, eight eggs beaten separately, pint sugar, grated nutmeg, tea-spoon salt; flour fruit thoroughly from a quart of flour, then mix remainder as follows: In a large bowl or tray put the eggs with sugar, nutmeg and milk, stir in the fruit, bread-crumbs and suet, one after the other until all are used, adding enough flour to make the fruit stick together, which will take about all the quart; dip pudding-cloth in boiling-water, dredge on inside a thick coating of flour, put in pudding and tie tightly, allowing room to swell, and boil from two to three hours in a good-sized pot with plenty of hot water, replenishing as needed from tea-kettle. When done, turn in a large flat dish and send to table with a sprig of holly, or any bit of evergreen with bright berries, stuck in the top. Serve with any pudding-sauce. This recipe furnishes enough for twenty people, but if the family is small, one-half the quantity may be prepared, or it is equally good warmed over by steaming. For sauce, cream a half pound sweet butter, stir in three-quarters pound brown sugar, and the beaten yolk of an egg; simmer for a few moments over a slow fire, stirring almost constantly; when near boiling add a half pint bottled grape-juice, and serve after grating a little nutmeg on the surface.-Mrs. Ex-Gov. Coke, Texas.
A boiled cloth pudding of the plainer American sort — no brandy, no molasses, and mild enough that the sauce carries most of the flavor. Everything here is measured by volume, and the boiling time given is optimistic for a pudding this size.
- The measuresA quart is 4 cups, a pint 2 cups, a half pint 1 cup. Nothing is weighed, so treat the flour as an upper limit rather than a fixed amount: add it until the mixture holds together, which is exactly what the original says.
- Boiling timeTwo to three hours looks short for a batch that feeds twenty; cloth puddings of this bulk are often given considerably longer -- five or six hours at a steady boil is common -- with a half quantity needing proportionately less. Undercooked suet pudding is pasty in the center.
- Keep the water boilingThe pot must stay at a real boil the whole time, and it must be topped up from a kettle of boiling water only. Cold water added mid-cook drops the temperature and gives you a heavy, sodden layer where the pudding stopped cooking.
- SuetAsk a butcher for beef kidney fat and chop or grate it cold; a quart chopped is roughly a pound. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, substitutes directly and is far less work. Do not use butter — it melts out and the pudding collapses.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold at holiday baking counters. Candied mixed peel or chopped candied orange is the usual stand-in if you cannot find it.
- Bread-crumbsStale bread torn and crumbled by hand or pulsed briefly, not fine dried crumbs from a canister, which absorb differently and tighten the texture.
- Cloth or basinThe floured cloth is authentic and works: scald it, dredge the inside heavily with flour, and tie it securely while still leaving room for the pudding to swell, as the original directs. A modern alternative is buttered pudding basins -- enough of them to take the full quantity -- covered with pleated parchment and foil, set on a rack in a covered pot with water halfway up the sides.
- The sauceButter, brown sugar and one yolk, simmered but never boiled — take it off the heat the moment it thickens or the yolk will scramble. Serve it warm; it separates as it cools and needs a brisk whisk to come back.
- Yield and keepingTwenty servings as written. The original notes it is equally good warmed over by steaming; wrap and steam leftovers until heated through.
Plum pudding takes its name from the older English sense of "plum" as any dried fruit, chiefly raisins — there are no plums in it and have not been for centuries. By the mid-1800s the boiled cloth pudding, carried to the table whole and crowned with greenery, was a familiar feature of Christmas dinner in America as well as England, and cookbooks of the period print dozens of versions. This one is notably restrained: no brandy in the batter, no dark spices beyond nutmeg, no flaming at the table, with milk and bread-crumbs doing the work that suet-and-spirit does in the richer British recipes. The attribution to "Mrs. Ex-Gov. Coke, Texas" is typical of The Dixie Cook Book, which gathered contributions from prominent Southern households and printed the donor's rank alongside the recipe — the wife of Richard Coke, governor of Texas in the mid-1870s, is generally taken to be the contributor. The grape-juice sauce may be a small sign of the times: bottled unfermented grape juice is often said to have appealed to temperance-minded homes as a substitute for the wine such a sauce would once have carried.