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Plum Pudding
Beat together half cup sugar, two eggs and one tea-spoon butter, add three pints sweet milk, a little salt, six crackers rolled fine, one cup raisins, and a half sheet gelatine dissolved in a little water; season with nutmeg or cinnamon. Bake in a pudding-dish. -Mrs. Dr. Stall,
A baked cracker custard wearing the name of a much richer dish. The whole thing hinges on treating it as a custard: low heat, and pull it while the center still trembles.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century shorthand for fresh, unsoured milk, as opposed to buttermilk or clabber. Use whole milk; three pints is six cups.
- CrackersPlain unsweetened soda or water crackers, not graham. Six rolled fine give something in the neighbourhood of three-quarters to one cup of crumbs, depending on the size of the cracker; the crumbs are what thicken the custard along with the eggs.
- The half sheet of gelatineLeaf gelatine of the period was not standardized, so this quantity is genuinely ambiguous. A modern sheet runs about 2 grams; half a sheet in six cups of milk is a token amount, and the pudding will set perfectly well on eggs and crumbs if you leave it out.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven direction beyond "bake in a pudding-dish." For a milk-and-egg custard, 325-350F is the working range, no hotter, or the eggs curdle and weep.
- Water bathSet the pudding-dish in a larger pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides. Bake until a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean and the center still wobbles, about an hour to an hour and a quarter; internal temperature around 170-175F.
- Two eggs to six cupsThat is a very lean custard by modern habit, and it relies on the crumbs for body. If you want a firmer, sliceable pudding, three or four eggs is closer to current practice.
- RaisinsPlump them in warm water or a little sherry first, then drain, so they do not draw moisture from the custard. Expect them to settle toward the bottom either way.
- YieldSix cups of milk plus crumbs, raisins, eggs and sugar comes to rather more than two quarts, so use a dish of at least two and a half to three quarts. Serves eight. Good warm with hard sauce or a thin cream sauce; it is also decent cold.
The name is aspirational. A true plum pudding is a boiled suet pudding, dark with currants, candied peel and spirits, and "plum" in English cookery meant raisins long before it meant the fresh fruit. What Mrs. Dr. Stall offers is the household version of that idea: a baked milk custard bound with cracker crumbs and studded with raisins, which is to say a cousin of bread pudding by way of the cracker barrel. Cracker puddings turn up in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s. The Dixie Cook Book, like other compilations of its era, credits each contribution to the woman who sent it in, which is why the page ends with a name and a trailing comma rather than a serving suggestion.