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Plum Pudding
Carefully remove the fibres and strings from half pound fresh beef-kidney suet; finely chop with two tablespoons flour and place in a large bowl, adding half pound well-picked and washed currants, half pound seeded Malaga grapes, quarter pound fresh bread crumbs, two ounces chopped candied lemon peel, half pound fine sugar, half teaspoon ground cinnamon, one saltspoon ground nutmeg, half pint good rum and three eggs. Briskly mix the whole together with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Dip a piece of cloth in cold water and wring it out. Spread the cloth on a table, lightly butter it with the hand and sprinkle a little flour over it; shake the cloth to remove the excess of flour. Place the contents of the bowl in the centre of the cloth, bring up the four corners together so as to entirely enclose the pudding and tightly tie it around. Have plenty of boiling water in a large pan and plunge in the pudding. Cover the pan and let boil for two and a half hours. Remove it from the water and hang up for ten minutes. Cut the string and carefully turn it on a hot dish without breaking. Dredge with three tablespoons sugar, pour over one gill of rum, set it on fire and immediately serve with a hard sauce separately N. B. The above pudding will be considerably more than enough for one dinner, and whatever is left over can be wrapped in a clean cloth and put away in a cold place, as it will keep in good condition for three weeks.
A cloth-boiled Christmas pudding of the richer sort, with very little flour and a great deal of rum. A few of its assumptions need translating before you tie the cloth.
- The hinge: keep the water at a full boilThe pudding sets by coagulating egg and melting suet inside a permeable cloth; if the water drops off the boil the mixture slumps and water seeps in, giving a sodden outer layer. Keep the pan topped up from a kettle of boiling water so the pudding stays fully submerged for the whole two and a half hours.
- SuetFresh beef kidney suet is now a butcher's special order in most places; packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetable) works and needs no picking over, though it is drier and already floured. Half a pound is about 225 g.
- "Seeded Malaga grapes"Malaga grapes were sold both fresh and dried, and the instruction is genuinely ambiguous. In a keeping pudding the intent is almost certainly the dried fruit — large muscat raisins, seeded — and modern seedless muscat or Thompson raisins substitute directly. Fresh grapes would release far too much water.
- Old measuresA saltspoon is a scant quarter teaspoon. A gill is half a cup (4 fl oz); half a pint of rum is a full cup, so the pudding carries about a cup and a half of spirit in total.
- The batter is very looseTwo tablespoons of flour and a quarter pound of crumbs is all the binder for two pounds of fruit, sugar and suet, so expect a wet, barely cohesive mass. The floured, buttered cloth is doing structural work — wring it out well, flour it evenly, and tie tightly with room for only slight swelling.
- Hanging and turning outThe ten minutes hanging lets steam escape and the surface firm up; skip it and the pudding tears when unwrapped. Turn it onto a heated dish, since a cold plate chills the fat immediately.
- FlamingWarm the gill of rum before pouring it over — cold spirit is much harder to light — and light it away from the bottle, extractor fan off, with nothing overhead. Sugar dredged on first helps carry the flame.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter beaten with powdered sugar and flavoured with brandy or rum, served cold and firm so it melts over the hot pudding.
- Yield and keepingThis makes roughly 8 to 10 servings. The book's three weeks in a cold place assumed an unheated larder; refrigerate the remainder wrapped, and reheat portions by steaming.
Boiled suet puddings tied in a floured cloth are the older English form of the Christmas pudding, predating the basin-and-steamer method that took over in the nineteenth century, and the plum in the name refers to dried fruit generally rather than to plums — "plum" was a common term for raisins and currants, and the usual explanation is that dried plums once stood in for them. The dried-fruit-and-suet lineage is usually traced back to the medieval and early modern plum porridge, a spiced meat broth thickened with fruit and breadcrumbs that gradually shed its meat and stiffened into a pudding. The closing note on keeping the remainder for three weeks is a reminder that the alcohol and sugar were preservatives as much as flavourings.