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English Plum Pudding
pound raisins, seeded, cut in pieces and floured pound currants 2 ounces finely cut citron pound suet 1-41-23-41-31-3 cup fruit juice grated nutmeg teaspoon cinnamon teaspoon cloves teaspoon mace teaspoons salt Scald bread crumbs and milk, let stand until cool, add sugar, beaten yolks of eggs, raisins, currants and citron; chop suet, and cream by using the hand; combine mixtures, then add fruit juice, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, mace and whites of eggs beaten stiff. Turn into buttered mold, cover and steam 6 hours. Serve with hard sauce.
A steamed suet pudding of the classic British Christmas type, thickened with scalded bread crumbs rather than flour. The method is sound; the quantities as printed are unreliable, so work from a proportion you trust.
- Working proportionsA pudding of this style is generally built on roughly equal weights of raisins and currants, with suet and bread crumbs in smaller proportion, bound with eggs and enough milk to scald the crumbs to a paste. These are approximations, not the book's figures, which are unreadable as printed. Treat the printed measures as a guide only and check the total against a mould you own.
- SuetBeef suet from a butcher must be stripped of membrane and chopped or grated fine, which is what "cream by using the hand" means -- the warmth of the palm works it to a soft mass that disperses through the fruit. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, substitutes weight for weight and skips that step.
- CitronCandied citron peel, not the fresh fruit. It has become hard to find outside the Christmas season; mixed candied peel or candied orange peel stands in without much loss.
- Flouring the raisinsTossing the cut raisins in flour is the usual way of keeping fruit from sinking to the bottom of the mould during a long steam. The recipe gives no flour quantity; a tablespoon or two is enough.
- The mould and the steamButter the mould well and fill it no more than two-thirds; the pudding rises. Cover with buttered parchment and foil pleated down the middle, tie it, and set the mould on a rack in a pot of simmering water reaching halfway up the sides. Top up with boiling water as it goes -- over six hours the pan will need refilling more than once.
- Six hours is not excessiveLong, gentle steaming works the suet through and sets the crumb into a dense texture. A much shorter steam gives a paler, cakier pudding.
- Keeping and reheatingPuddings of this type were often made in advance, though a pudding bound with milk and no spirits will not keep like a brandy-fed one; keep it refrigerated and use it within a few days. Re-steam for an hour to an hour and a half before serving.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and flavoured with brandy or vanilla, served cold in a mound so it melts over the hot slice.
- YieldThe printed quantities are too garbled to fix a yield or a mould size; judge both against the volume of batter you actually end up with.
Plum pudding kept the word "plum" long after the fruit left it: in early modern English a plum was any dried fruit, and by the eighteenth century the pudding meant raisins and currants bound with suet and crumbs, boiled in a cloth. Its Christmas association is already attested in the eighteenth century, and the Victorians fixed rather than created it, so that by the early twentieth century the pudding was a set piece for the December dinner rather than everyday cooking. The bread-crumb base rather than flour marks it as the older line of the recipe, and the six-hour steam is a survival from the days when the pudding was boiled submerged in a pot or copper.