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Christmas Plum Pudding
Mrs. Snider.
One pound raisins chopped fine, one pound currants, three-quarters pound bread crumbs, half-pound flour, threequarters pound of beef suet, three eggs, one-half pound citron and lemon peel, half a nutmeg, and one teaspoon ground ginger, two teaspoons Cook's Friend, sweet milk enough just to wet all; tie in a cloth and boil three hours.
A plain Victorian boiled pudding, given by weight and with no sugar at all — the sweetness comes entirely from two pounds of dried fruit and the candied peel. A few points before you tie the cloth.
- Cook's FriendA Canadian-made commercial baking powder that turns up in nineteenth-century Canadian cookbooks. Use two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder.
- Weights into volumeOne pound of raisins is about 3 cups; a pound of currants about 3 1/4 cups. Three-quarters pound of bread crumbs is roughly 5 to 6 cups of soft fresh crumbs, and half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups. Weighing is easier and more accurate here than measuring.
- SuetThree-quarters of a pound of beef suet, finely chopped or grated — ask a butcher, since the shredded packaged kind is uncommon outside Britain. Keep it cold so it stays in distinct flakes; it melts during boiling and leaves the crumb open. Frozen grated butter is a common substitute, and vegetable shortening works, though the flavour is flatter.
- "Sweet milk enough just to wet all"Sweet milk simply means fresh milk rather than sour or buttermilk. Add it a little at a time until the mixture drops reluctantly from the spoon — no more. A slack batter gives a heavy, sodden pudding.
- The clothScald a square of unbleached cotton or linen, wring it out, flour the inside surface generously, heap in the batter, and tie it loosely enough to let the pudding swell. It goes into a large pot of boiling water on a trivet or an inverted plate so it does not touch the bottom, and the water must stay at a bare boil the whole time and be topped up from a kettle. A greased pudding basin of at least 3 quarts, covered with pleated parchment and foil and steamed, is the modern equivalent.
- Three hours is the minimumThree hours -- This quantity makes a large pudding. Many nineteenth-century recipes for puddings of this size call for four to six hours, and longer boiling is what darkens the pudding and sets the crumb.
- Half a nutmegGrated fresh, that is about one full teaspoon of ground nutmeg — assertive but correct for the period alongside the ginger.
- Yield and servingThe ingredients come to roughly 5 pounds of pudding, serving a dozen or more. Turn it out hot, and serve with hard sauce, brandy butter, or a plain sweet custard, which supplies the sugar the pudding itself lacks.
- KeepingWrapped and refrigerated it will keep for some time; steam or boil it again for about an hour to reheat.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is generally counted the first Canadian fundraising cookbook — hence the named contributors like Mrs. Snider, each vouching for her own receipt. The boiled plum pudding she gives is the standard English Christmas pudding brought to Canada intact: "plum" is an older English word for any dried fruit, and by the nineteenth century such puddings contained raisins and currants but no plums whatever. Into that inherited recipe come two teaspoons of Cook's Friend, a commercial baking powder, sitting alongside the suet, the eggs and the long boiling.