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Unrivalled Plum Pudding
Mrs. J. E. Smith.
Two pounds and a half of raisins, one or three quarters pound of currants, two pounds of the finest moist sugar, two pounds bread crumbs, sixteen eggs, two pounds finely chopped suet, six ounces of mixed candied peel, the rind of two lemons, one ounce of ground nutmeg, one ounce of ground cinnamon, half an ounce of pounded bitter almonds, one-quarter of a pint of brandy. Mode : stone and cut up the raisins, do not chop them; wash and dry the currants; cut the candied peel into thin slices; mix all the dry ingredients well together, and moisten with the eggs, which should be well beaten and strained; then stir in the brandy; and when all is thoroughly mixed, add butter and flour, and put the pudding into a stout new cloth; tie it down very tightly and closely ; boil from six to eight hours, and serve with brandy sauce. This quantity may be divided and boiled in buttered moulds.
This is a large Victorian boiled pudding of the Beeton type, and one ingredient in it is no longer treated as food. The notes below explain the problem and translate the archaic terms for reading purposes.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopHalf an ounce of pounded bitter almonds is roughly a dozen kernels. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted, exactly the treatment this recipe calls for. Their sale for eating is restricted in the United States and tightly controlled elsewhere for this reason.
- Boiling does not make it safeLong boiling drives off some hydrogen cyanide and denatures some of the enzyme, but the loss is neither complete nor predictable, and here the almonds are sealed inside a dense pudding of some ten to twelve pounds where volatiles have nowhere to go. The dose in any given slice cannot be estimated. Use a current plum pudding recipe instead.
- Sixteen eggs and no flourThe bulk here is bread crumbs and suet rather than flour, which is characteristic of the richest nineteenth-century puddings. The line "add butter and flour" almost certainly refers to buttering and flouring the cloth, not to the mixture; the text as printed is garbled.
- Moist sugar"The finest moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined cane sugar with some molasses still in it, closest today to a light muscovado. It is not the same as modern white granulated.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard kidney fat, was bought in the lump and chopped by hand. Shredded packet suet and vegetarian suet are the modern equivalents; neither behaves quite like hand-chopped fresh suet, which melts more slowly and leaves a coarser crumb.
- A quarter of a pint of brandyIn an English book of this period a pint is 20 fluid ounces, so a quarter pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup — noticeably more than a US quarter pint.
- ScaleThe dry ingredients alone come to close to ten pounds. The instruction to divide the quantity among buttered moulds is not optional advice for a modern household; a single cloth pudding of this size would need six to eight hours of hard boiling with the water kept topped up.
The wording of this recipe is close to the plum-pudding formulas printed in Victorian household manuals, and its appearance here over the name of a contributor is typical of how nineteenth-century community cookbooks were assembled: a subscriber copied out a formula she trusted, from a book or a family manuscript, and the compilers printed it under her name. Bitter almonds were a standard flavouring in Victorian confectionery and puddings, valued for the intense marzipan note that sweet almonds lack, and cookery writers of the period used them freely with only occasional warnings about quantity. Boiled plum pudding itself descends from the older savoury-sweet "plum porridge" served at the start of a meal, and "plum" here means raisins and currants, dried fruit having carried the name long after the fresh fruit dropped out of the dish.