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Small and Cheap Plum Pudding
One cup suet, one cup raisins, one cup currants, one cup molasses, one egg, four cups flour, one cup milk, one teaspoon soda, one teaspoon cloves, one teaspoon cinnamon; boil or steam three hours.
A plain boiled pudding of the everyday sort — no brandy, no candied peel, no long ageing — built on the cup measure so it could be made without scales. It works, but the batter is stiffer than modern eyes expect and the vessel matters more than the ingredients.
- The hinge: keep the water at a steady simmerWhether boiled in a cloth or steamed in a basin, the pot must never go off the boil and never run dry over three hours. Keep a kettle of boiling water beside it and top up as needed; cold water added to the pot stops the rise and gives a heavy, sodden middle.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded or grated fine and tossed with a little of the flour so it does not clump. Packaged shredded suet sold for puddings works directly; butcher's suet needs the membrane picked out first. Frozen butter grated on a coarse box grater is the usual substitute, though it gives a denser crumb.
- Soda, not baking powderOne teaspoon of soda is bicarbonate of soda, and it is here to react with the acid in the molasses — the two are a pair. Do not swap in baking powder measure for measure.
- MolassesMolasses of this period varied in grade, but ordinary cane molasses — closer to what is sold today as light or full-flavour molasses than to blackstrap — is the likelier match. Blackstrap is markedly more bitter, and its different acidity may affect both taste and the lift from the soda.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants — small dried grapes — not fresh red or black currants. Rinse and dry them if they are dusty, and check for stems.
- The batter is thickFour cups of flour against a cup of milk, a cup of molasses and one egg makes a stiff, spoonable mass rather than a pourable batter. That is correct for a boiled pudding; resist the urge to loosen it, or it will not hold shape when turned out.
- Vessel and preparationThe mixture runs to well over two quarts, so butter a large basin generously — allow about three quarts, or divide between two smaller ones — fill about two-thirds, and cover with pleated parchment and foil tied under the rim, or use a lidded pudding mould. If boiling in a cloth, scald the cloth, flour it well, and tie it loosely to allow expansion. Steaming in a covered pot with the basin on a trivet is the easier route.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should shrink slightly from the sides. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out. This makes roughly eight to ten servings and keeps well wrapped for several days; slices reheat by steaming for twenty minutes.
- ServingThe recipe says nothing about a sauce. A hard sauce of butter, sugar and a little brandy, or a simple sweet milk sauce, is the sort of thing that would have been served with it.
"Plum pudding" kept its name long after plums left it — in older English usage a plum meant any dried fruit, chiefly raisins, and the term stuck to the boiled fruit pudding that became fixed as the British Christmas dish in the nineteenth century. What appears here is the household version of that grand pudding: no eggs by the half-dozen, no suet by the pound, no brandy, no month of maturing in the pantry. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by local women and sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, and its pages are full of exactly this kind of arithmetic — one cup of each thing, one teaspoon of each spice, easily remembered and easily halved. Suet puddings of this sort appear often in Canadian and American cookbooks of the period as plain family fare as well as festive dishes, and the cheapness of this one was evidently a selling point worth putting in the title.