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Plum Pudding (III)
Mrs. Gale.
One and a half pounds of suet, one pound stoned raisins, one pound currants, eight eggs, half grated nutmeg, two ounces candied peel, one teaspoonful ground ginger, half pound bread crumbs, half pound flour, two pounds dark sugar, half pint milk. Boil ten hours and serve with brandy sauce. Excellent.
A plain Victorian boiled plum pudding: no leavening, no spirits in the batter, and a full working day in the pot. The numbers are large, so read the yield note before you start.
- Yield firstThe mixture comes to well over eight pounds, once the eggs and milk are counted with the six and a half pounds of dry goods and fruit. That is several basins' worth or one very large cloth pudding, and it will serve a crowd. Halving the recipe works without adjustment other than shortening the boil.
- The half pint of milkThe Home Cook Book is Canadian, so the measure is most likely an imperial half pint, 10 fl oz or 1 1/4 cups. If you are working from US measures, 1 cup is close enough; the batter should be stiff, not pourable.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded in some butcher shops and as packaged shredded suet in British groceries. Frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is one common stand-in, though it melts sooner and gives a denser crumb.
- Ingredient names"Stoned raisins" are pitted raisins. "Currants" means dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. "Candied peel" is mixed candied citrus peel, finely chopped. "Dark sugar" is dark brown sugar; two pounds is very sweet by current taste and can be cut by a third with no structural harm.
- Boiling versus steamingTen hours is not an error for a pudding of this size, but a covered basin standing on a trivet in an inch or two of simmering water, lidded, does the same work with less attention. Either way the pot must never go dry -- top it up with boiling water, never cold, or the pudding sinks.
- Cloth or basinFor a cloth pudding, scald the cloth, flour it well on the inside face, and tie it with room for expansion. For basins, grease and cover with pleated parchment and foil tied under the rim so no water gets in.
- Doneness and keepingA skewer should come out clean and the pudding smell of caramel rather than raw flour. Cooked puddings keep for weeks in a cool place in their basins; reheat by steaming an hour or two before serving.
- The brandy sauceNone is given. Period brandy sauces ranged from a hard sauce (butter creamed with sugar and brandy, served cold onto the hot pudding) to a thin custard or melted butter-and-sugar sauce flavoured with brandy.
Boiled plum pudding earns its name from an older sense of "plum", which by the seventeenth century meant any dried fruit, raisins and currants in particular; no plums are involved. It descends from savoury spiced pottages and puddings boiled in a cloth or gut casing, and the shift to a sweet, fruit-heavy, suet-bound version boiled for the better part of a day was well established in British kitchens by the early nineteenth century. Its arrival in a Toronto community cookbook of the 1870s under a subscriber's name, Mrs. Gale, is typical of the genre, in which multiple plum pudding recipes sit side by side. The single-word verdict at the end, "Excellent", is the whole of the editorial apparatus these books usually offered."