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Baked Plum Pudding
To make the old-fashioned baked plum pudding, chop fine a quarter of a pound of beef suet (beef's marrow is nicer for the purpose if it can be obtained). Mix in a teaspoonful of salt. Have ready a pound of bread crumbs, which have been dried and sifted and moisten with enough boiling milk to thoroughly soften them. When they are nearly cold, add the suet or marrow, and add also half a pound of sugar, half a pound of stoned raisins, half a pound of currants, half a pound citron and six eggs. Mix a grated nutmeg, a tablespoonful of cinnamon, a teaspoonful of cloves and teaspoonful of mace. Add the spices, mixing them in thoroughly. Add last of all, a gill of maderia and a half gill of good brandy. This pudding should be moist enough to prevent its being dry when baked, as it is not a soft pudding, but a firm, compact one. Serve it with a rich brandy sauce. Bake it slowly for two or three hours.
A baked rather than boiled plum pudding: dense, spiced and closer to a rich bread pudding than to the steamed Christmas kind. A few of the measures and materials need translating.
- GillA gill is 4 fl oz in American measure, or half a cup — so half a cup of Madeira and a quarter cup of brandy (an imperial gill is 5 fl oz). The alcohol is the last thing in, after the spices.
- "Bake it slowly"The recipe names no oven, only that it should be slow. Something in the region of 300F for two to three hours in a deep buttered dish, covered for most of the time to stop the top drying and scorching; a skewer to the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel firm rather than springy.
- Suet and marrowBeef suet is the hard kidney fat, and a butcher will still grate or grind it for you; packaged shredded suet works as well. Marrow, the author's preference, has to be scraped from cracked leg bones and is softer and sweeter — worth doing if you have the bones, but not a like-for-like substitute in handling, since it melts far more readily.
- A pound of dried crumbsThat is a very large quantity — dried and sifted crumbs pack densely, so a pound runs to something like 4 to 5 cups, and more than one large loaf once the bread has been dried out and sieved. They are scalded with boiling milk until fully softened; the recipe gives no volume, so add it a little at a time until the crumbs are wet through but not swimming, and let them cool before the fat goes in or it will simply melt out.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced for fruitcake. Half a pound is a lot of it by modern taste; candied orange and lemon peel can carry part of the weight. "Stoned raisins" only means pitted, which all supermarket raisins now are.
- The spicesA whole grated nutmeg plus a tablespoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon each of cloves and mace is a heavy hand even for a pudding of this size. Grate the nutmeg fresh, and consider scaling the cloves back if you are not aiming for a period flavour profile.
- Moisture is the hingeThe author says so directly: this is a firm, compact pudding, and if the batter looks stiff going into the dish it will bake dry. It should drop reluctantly from the spoon after the wine and brandy are stirred in.
- Yield and servingA large pudding, the mixture running to several pounds — enough for ten to twelve small portions, as it is very rich. The brandy sauce is not given here; any hard sauce or a butter-sugar-brandy sauce of the period suits it.
"Plum" in the English pudding tradition means dried fruit generally, not plums — raisins and currants displaced the actual prunes of the medieval fruit pottages, but the name stuck long after.