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Eggless Plum Pudding
Heaping cup bread-crumbs, two cups flour, one of suet chopped fine, one of raisins, one of molasses, one of sweet milk, table-spoon soda, tea-spoon salt, one of cloves, and one of cinnamon; boil two and a half hours in a two-quart pail, set in a kettle of boiling water or steam for the same time. For sauce take one cup white sugar, butter size of an egg, grated rind of one lemon, and white of an egg.-Mrs. Mary Lee Gere.
A steamed suet pudding that leans on soda and molasses instead of eggs, from the era when eggs were seasonal and expensive. The method is straightforward; the quantities need a little interpretation.
- Read the spice measures correctly"One of cloves, and one of cinnamon" continues the teaspoon measure from the salt, not the cup measures before it. A teaspoon each of ground cloves and cinnamon is right for this quantity of batter.
- The soda is the hingeA tablespoon of soda in two cups of flour is far more than modern practice; molasses of the period was generally more acidic than today's, and the soda would have both leavened the batter and neutralised that sourness. With modern mild unsulphured molasses, around two teaspoons is likely closer to balanced; the full tablespoon risks a soapy, faintly metallic edge.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded in some markets and available from a butcher on request. Chop or grate it while cold. Frozen grated butter is a common substitute, though the pudding will be denser and less light.
- Sweet milkSimply means fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabber that a nineteenth-century kitchen also had on hand. Whole milk.
- The pail and the water bathA two-quart pail is a straight-sided tin pail with a lid; a two-quart pudding basin or metal bowl covered tightly with foil, or a buttered coffee can, does the same job. Grease it well, fill no more than two-thirds, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pot never runs dry.
- DonenessTwo and a half hours is accurate for this size. A skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should pull slightly from the sides; if in doubt, another twenty minutes will not hurt a steamed pudding.
- The sauceThis is a foamy hard sauce: cream the butter with the sugar and lemon rind, then beat in the stiffly whipped white and serve at once over the hot pudding. The white is never cooked, so use a pasteurized egg white if the sauce is going to anyone elderly, pregnant, or immune-compromised.
- Yield and keepingServes eight to ten. Steamed puddings improve for a day or two wrapped and chilled; resteam thirty to forty minutes to serve.
Eggless, butterless and milkless cakes and puddings are a standing feature of American community cookbooks, and they long predate the wartime rationing usually credited with them. In a household keeping its own hens, eggs were plentiful in spring and scarce in midwinter, exactly when a boiled plum pudding was most wanted, so cooks worked out versions that relied on soda reacting with molasses for lift and on suet and bread-crumbs for richness. "Plum" here means raisins: the word kept its older English sense of any dried fruit long after fresh plums had nothing to do with the dish. The Dixie Cook Book prints such recipes over the names of the local women who contributed them, and the sauce appears almost as an afterthought to Mrs. Gere's pudding rather than under its own heading.