Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Plum Pudding (II)
Plum Pudding (II)
Mrs. E. Hempstead.
One pint raisins, one pint currants, one pint suet, one pint flour, one-half pint bread crumbs, one cup milk, five eggs, spices to taste, a little candied orange and lemon ; mix all together and boil three hours. To be eaten with wine sauce.
A plain steamed pudding written in the volume-measure shorthand of the 1870s: everything is a pint, so you can scale it by eye. The recipe assumes you already know how a pudding gets into and out of a cloth.
- The hinge: steam, don't boil dryThe hinge: keep the water moving but not violent -- "boil three hours" in practice means a steady simmer with the water topped up as it evaporates, whether the pudding is tied in a cloth or set in a covered basin. If the pot boils dry the pudding scorches.
- Pints are volume, not weightA pint is 2 cups: 2 cups raisins, 2 cups currants, 2 cups suet, 2 cups flour, 1 cup breadcrumbs. Measured as weight this comes to roughly 10 oz raisins, 10 oz currants, 8-9 oz shredded suet and 8 oz flour.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded or chopped fine and tossed with a little of the flour so it stays separate. Butchers will still supply it and packaged shredded suet is sold for exactly this purpose; frozen butter grated coarse is the usual substitute, though the crumb is softer.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, small black raisins, not the fresh redcurrants of a garden. Anything sold as "currants" in the baking aisle is correct.
- Spices to tasteCinnamon, nutmeg, mace and cloves are the usual quartet for a pudding of this kind; something on the order of 1 tsp each of cinnamon and nutmeg with ½ tsp each of mace and cloves gives a moderate result. The recipe also omits salt, and a pinch is worth adding.
- Vessel and preparationButter a 3-quart pudding basin or covered mold generously (the mixture comes to nearly three quarts), fill it no more than three-quarters, and cover with pleated parchment and foil tied under the rim. Boiling the pudding tied up in a floured cloth is the older method.
- Candied peel"A little candied orange and lemon" is best read as about ¼ cup total, chopped small. Note that this batter carries no sugar of its own beyond the fruit and peel.
- Wine sauceThe intended accompaniment is a hot sauce of butter, sugar and sherry or Madeira thickened slightly, served in a jug. A hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar with spirit beaten in serves the same purpose.
- Yield and keepingThis is a large pudding, enough for 10 to 12. It can be steamed a day or two ahead, kept cold and wrapped, and reheated by steaming an hour; with no sugar or spirit in it, this is not a pudding to hold for weeks.
Plum pudding kept the name long after plums left it: "plum" was the old English catch-all for any dried fruit, and by the eighteenth century the pudding meant raisins and currants bound with suet. It began as a boiled-in-cloth descendant of medieval pottages and thickened over time into the dense, spiced, cloth-tied round that Victorian households associated with Christmas dinner. That this book carries two versions, one after another and each credited to a different contributor, is characteristic of a community cookbook: the recipes were collected from named local women rather than written by a single author. The absence of sugar and brandy here, and the mildness of "spices to taste," sets it apart from the heavily fortified festival kind.