Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Steamed Plum Pudding
Steamed Plum Pudding
Mrs. J. W. Farlin.
One and one-fourth cups beef suet, two cups raisins, four cups flour, one cup milk, one cup molasses, one teaspoon soda, one teaspoon salt. Season with nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and allspice to taste; steam four hours. Do not uncover the steamer, but raise occasionally to fill the kettle with boiling water.
A plain suet pudding of the frugal sort — no eggs, no sugar beyond the molasses, and leavening that depends on the soda meeting the molasses. A few things need translating before it works on a modern stove.
- The hinge: a tight lid and constant waterThe instruction not to uncover the steamer is the whole technique. Steam is what cooks and lifts this pudding; every lift of the lid drops the temperature and the pudding sets heavy. Top up with boiling water only, never cold, and keep the water at a steady simmer for the full four hours.
- Beef suetThis means hard fat from around the kidneys, not trimmings. Ask a butcher; it is often free or nearly so. Chill it hard and grate it, or pulse briefly in a food processor with a spoonful of the flour to keep it from smearing. Packaged shredded suet works directly. Vegetable shortening will substitute but gives a softer, less fragrant crumb.
- Soda and molassesThe teaspoon of soda is reacting with the acid in the molasses, so mix the two together and get the pudding into the steamer promptly. Use unsulphured molasses; blackstrap is more bitter than what a 19th-century cook would have poured.
- The batter is stiffFour cups of flour against one cup of milk and one cup of molasses makes a thick, spoonable dough rather than a pourable batter. That is correct for this style, but if it will not drop from the spoon at all, a few tablespoons more milk is reasonable.
- Spicing "to taste"For this quantity, roughly a teaspoon of cinnamon, half a teaspoon each of nutmeg and allspice, and a quarter teaspoon of cloves gives a well-spiced but not medicinal pudding.
- Mold and setupThis makes a large quantity, better than two quarts of batter, so use a mold of about three quarts or divide between two smaller basins, greased well and filled no more than two-thirds. Cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down, or use the mold's clip lid. Set it on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pot so it does not sit on the metal bottom, with water reaching halfway up the sides.
- Doneness and yieldFour hours is genuine, not padding: the pudding comes up close to the temperature of the boiling water around it and the long cook is what darkens and mellows it. A skewer should come out clean. Expect to serve 8 to 10.
- ServingThe pudding itself is barely sweet, so a sauce suits it, though the recipe as printed says nothing about one. Hard sauce (butter creamed with powdered sugar and a spoon of brandy) or a warm lemon or vanilla sauce are the usual period accompaniments.
- KeepingSteamed puddings improve after a day or two. Cool in the mold, wrap well, refrigerate, and re-steam 30 to 45 minutes to serve.
Plum pudding kept its name long after it stopped containing plums: "plum" was the older English word for any dried fruit, raisins above all, and by the eighteenth century the boiled or steamed suet pudding studded with raisins had settled into the shape recognized here. This version is plain household cooking — no eggs, no brandy, no candied peel, sweetened entirely with molasses, a cheap sweetener at the time The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s. Contributed recipes like Mrs. Farlin's were the whole point of such books, gathered from subscribers and often sold for charity, and they record what people actually cooked rather than what a professional thought they should. The long steam suited a range that was already lit all day, and the pudding's four hours cost nothing but water. Suet, meanwhile, was simply available: any household buying beef had access to it, and using it in a sweet dish was ordinary rather than eccentric.