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Plum Pudding (IV)
Miss M. R. Beard.
Half pound of raisins, quarter pound of currants, quarter pound of sugar, bread crumbs, quarter of a pound of flour, half pound suet, six eggs, half cup milk; nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt; half pound citron and lemon peel; to boil five hours.
A compact Victorian boiled pudding written for a cook who already knew the method: the ingredient list is complete but the technique is left entirely to the reader. A few things need pinning down before you start.
- The missing measurementBread crumbs are listed without a quantity. A quarter pound, matching the flour, is a reasonable starting point for a pudding of these proportions; add more only if the batter will not hold a spoon upright.
- SuetHalf a pound of beef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, grated or finely chopped and tossed with a little of the flour so it stays separate. Butchers will still order it; frozen shredded suet works, and vegetable suet gives a lighter, slightly less savoury pudding.
- Spices left to tasteNutmeg, cinnamon and salt are unmeasured. A whole grated nutmeg is too much here; half a teaspoon of each spice and a scant teaspoon of salt suits this quantity of fruit.
- Citron and lemon peelHalf a pound between them, candied, chopped small. Candied citron is a specialist item now; mixed candied peel is the usual substitute, though it is sweeter and less resinous than true citron.
- How it is boiledThe pudding goes into a well-buttered and floured cloth or a covered basin, then into a pot of boiling water that comes at least halfway up. Keep it at a steady simmer and top up with boiling water so the level never drops, or the exposed side of the pudding cooks dry.
- Five hours is not an errorA dense suet pudding of this size genuinely needs that long for the suet to melt through and the flour to cook out. Steaming in a covered basin over simmering water takes the same time and is easier to manage than a cloth.
- Yield and servingAround three and a half pounds of mixture, enough for eight to ten as it is very rich. Serve hot with hard sauce, a brandy sauce or thin cream.
- Keeping and reheatingPuddings like this were made ahead and improved for it. Cooled and wrapped, it keeps for weeks in a cool place; steam it again for an hour to an hour and a half to serve.
Boiled plum pudding is a British inheritance that the North American recipe books of the 1870s reproduced almost unchanged, and The Home Cook Book prints several versions in a row, each credited to a different contributor. "Plum" is the older, looser sense of the word, meaning dried fruit generally, so a plum pudding contains raisins and currants and no plums at all. The heavy suet, the long boil in a cloth and the fruit-to-flour ratio all descend from earlier savoury puddings; by the nineteenth century the dish had migrated firmly to the sweet end of the meal and attached itself to Christmas. Recipes of this compressed sort, credited to a named woman and assuming the reader knows how to tie a pudding cloth, are typical of the subscription cookbooks compiled by church and charity committees in the period.