Home › Puddings And Sauces › English Plum Pudding
English Plum Pudding
Beat six yolks and four whites of eggs very light, and add to them a tumbler of sweet milk; stir in gradually one-fourth pound grated or chopped stale bread, a pound flour, three-quarters pound sugar, and a pound each of beef-suet chopped very fine, currants nicely washed and dried, and stoned raisins, well floured; stir well, then add two nutmegs, a table-spoon mace, one of cinnamon or cloves, a wine-glass brandy, a tea-spoon salt, and finally another tumbler of milk. Boil in bowls or molds five hours, and serve with sauce made of drawn butter, wine, sugar, and nutmeg. These will keep for months; when wanted, boil one hour before using. A pound of citron or blanched sweet almonds adds to the richness of the pudling, but may be omitted. - Mrs. Collier.
A full-size Victorian boiled pudding: roughly five pounds of batter before the optional citron and almonds. Read the vessel and water instructions before you start, because the whole thing hinges on keeping the pot at a steady boil for five hours.
- The hinge: never let the water stop boilingThe pudding cooks by steam and swells as it goes; if the water drops off the boil or drops below the mold, the center sets badly and stays dense. Keep a kettle of boiling water alongside and top the pot up so the water stays two-thirds up the mold for the whole five hours.
- Tumbler and wine-glassA tumbler in American cookbooks of this period is usually reckoned at about a cup (8 fl oz), so roughly two cups of milk in total. A wine-glass is generally taken as about 2 fl oz of brandy.
- Bowls and moldsGrease heavily and fill only two-thirds full, then cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down with string, or use a lidded pudding basin. The older alternative was a floured cloth tied over the bowl, which works but lets in more water.
- Beef suetAsk a butcher for kidney suet and chop or grate it cold; packaged shredded suet also works. Do not substitute melted butter or oil, which will not hold the crumb open the way solid suet fat does.
- Two nutmegs is a great dealTwo whole grated nutmegs comes to something like four to six teaspoons, on top of a tablespoon of mace and a tablespoon of cinnamon or cloves. It is authentically forceful; halving the nutmeg gives a pudding most modern palates read as well spiced rather than medicinal.
- Stale breadGrate or pulse dry, plain white bread, not fresh soft sandwich bread. A quarter pound is somewhere between one and two cups depending on how finely it is grated.
- "These will keep for months"That claim assumes a cold larder, a well-sealed cloth and yearly practice. Refrigerate or freeze instead, then steam an hour to reheat as directed.
- Drawn butter sauceDrawn butter here is not simply melted butter: it is butter cooked briefly with a little flour and thinned with hot water into a thin white sauce, then sweetened and flavored with wine and nutmeg. Serve it warm, poured over the turned-out pudding.
- YieldA very large quantity: enough to fill two or three 1.5-quart molds two-thirds full, and to serve twenty or more, since a slice of this richness goes a long way. Divide the batter and freeze one.
The "plums" in plum pudding are raisins and currants: plum served for centuries in English usage as a general word for dried fruit, which is why a pudding with no plums in it keeps the name. The dish descends from the spiced, suet-thickened meat pottages of the medieval and early modern English kitchen, gradually losing the meat and keeping the suet, spice and dried fruit until by the nineteenth century it was fixed as the boiled Christmas pudding. Its appearance in The Dixie Cook Book, credited like much of that volume to a named contributor, shows how firmly English holiday cookery held its place in American compilations of the 1880s, and the frank cost of it here ains and suet, with optional citron and almonds aims it as a set-piece for a large household and a special table, not everyday food.