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English Plum Pudding
One pound of beef suet minced fine, one pound stale bread crumbed, two pounds of stoned raisins, one pound currants washed and dried; one-quarter of a pound of citron, one-half pound of English walnuts chopped fine, one pound of flour, one-fourth pint sweet milk, one-half pint molasses, seven eggs. Mix bread, flour and suet together. Beat the eggs, add to the milk; pour them into the pan containing flour and suet; beat well with a wooden spoon. Stir into the mixture raisins, currants, nuts and candied fruit, also one ounce of pulverized cinnamon. Add onehalf ounce of ginger, one dessert spoonful of cloves, one teaspoonful of allspice, one nutmeg, a little salt, a wine glass of brandy, and one-half pint of molasses, with a saltspoon of soda. The whole preparation should be well kneaded. Boil or steam seven hours. Allow room in the molds or bag, for swelling. What remains of a pudding can be mashed up and molded into a smaller form, so that it has the appearance of a new pudding; each time it is steamed the pudding improves. It can be kept in closed molds for months. For Christmas, serve it with flames about it and a piece of holly stuck in the top.
This way deserves special recommendation, not only because the pudding is better for the extra steaming, but for the reason one has always an unusually nice dessert, ready to be served at a short notice.
A full-sized Victorian boiled pudding, and the quantities are for a household, not a couple. Read the ingredient list twice before shopping: the molasses appears in both the list and the method, and the total is what you need to settle first.
- The molasses problemHalf a pint is called for in the ingredient list, then "one-half pint of molasses" again in the method. Either the writer is repeating one addition or intends a full pint. A pint of molasses in this quantity of batter is plausible but very dark and wet; half a pint (1 cup) is the safer reading.
- Old measuresA wine glass is about 2 fl oz, a saltspoon 1/4 teaspoon, a dessert spoonful 2 teaspoons. A quarter pint of milk is 1/2 cup, half a pint 1 cup. One ounce of pulverized cinnamon is roughly 4 tablespoons, and half an ounce of ginger about 2 tablespoons -- assertive but in keeping with the period.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers on request and rarely in supermarket cases. Grate or process it while very cold, or use packaged shredded suet. Frozen grated butter is the usual substitute, though the crumb will be softer and less springy.
- CitronCandied citron peel, not the whole citrus. Sold at Christmas in mixed candied fruit; buy it as whole peel and dice it yourself if you can, since pre-chopped mixes are often bulked out with cheaper candied melon rind.
- The mold and the waterFill basins or molds no more than two-thirds and cover tightly -- pleated parchment and foil tied with string, or a lidded pudding basin. Keep the water at a steady bare simmer halfway up the mold and top it up with boiling water; if it drops and the pudding cools, seven hours will not save the texture.
- Seven hours is not an errorLong slow steaming is what dissolves the suet through the crumb and darkens the fruit. The pudding is not testing for doneness in the cake sense; it is essentially finished after a few hours and improves thereafter. Later reheating steams of 1 to 2 hours are enough.
- Keeping itThe claim that it keeps for months in closed molds rests on sugar, fat and alcohol, and on a cold larder. Modern practice is to cool it completely, wrap it well and refrigerate, and to reheat by steaming until hot through rather than serving it lukewarm.
- FlamingWarm 2 to 3 tablespoons of brandy in a small pan until it just steams, pour it over the turned-out pudding and light it away from the extractor fan and anything hanging above. Cold spirit will not catch, and boiling it drives off the alcohol that does.
- YieldThe solid ingredients alone come to nearly seven pounds before the milk, molasses, eggs and brandy, so expect a very large pudding, easily thirty or more thin-wedge servings, or two to three smaller molds, which is the practical way to handle it. Serve with hard sauce or brandy butter.
The "plum" in plum pudding is a survival of the older English use of the word for dried fruit generally: there are no plums in it, and have not been since raisins and currants replaced them in the name's meaning by the seventeenth century. The dish descends from earlier boiled and sweetened meat puddings, and its progress from a plain suet-and-fruit boiled pudding to the dense, spiced, brandy-soaked Christmas centrepiece is generally traced through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the Victorians fixing it firmly to Christmas dinner and to the ceremony of the flaming brandy and the sprig of holly. American cookbooks, this one among them, kept it as an English import and a mark of an ambitious table -- the pound-by-pound scale and the seven-hour boil belonged to kitchens with a coal range going all day and a cold larder to hang the finished pudding in. The note about mashing up leftovers and re-steaming them into a smaller mold is the most practical line on the page, and the most revealing: nothing of this expense was thrown away.