Plum Roll
Add one teaspoonful of baking powder and a half teaspoonful of salt to one pint of sifted flour; sift again. Rub in one tablespoonful of butter, add sufficient milk to make a soft dough. Roll out, sprinkle with one cupful of chopped raisins and a half cupful of chopped citron. Dust with cinnamon, roll up and steam one-half hour. Serve warm with hard sauce. 1
A steamed suet-less pudding roll of the plainest sort — biscuit dough rolled around dried fruit. Two things decide whether it works: enough leavening, and steam that never stops.
- Keep the steam constantSet the roll on a rack over simmering, not boiling, water in a covered pot, and top up with boiling water if the level drops. If the steam falters the dough sets heavy and gluey in the middle.
- A pint of flourOne pint sifted is about 2 cups, or 8-9 oz. The dough should be soft enough to roll but not sticky; expect roughly 3/4 cup milk, added a little at a time.
- Leavening is thinOne teaspoon of baking powder for 2 cups of flour is well under what modern practice uses, which runs closer to two or three teaspoons. Two teaspoons gives the lift a steamed dough needs, and today's double-acting powder tolerates the wait before it hits the heat.
- CitronCandied citron peel, still sold at holidays and in Middle Eastern groceries. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes directly; plain mixed peel is closest in character.
- TimingHalf an hour steams a thin roll through at best. A roll made from all this dough wants 45 minutes to an hour — test with a skewer at the thickest point, which should come out clean and hot.
- WrappingThe recipe says only to roll up and steam, leaving the wrapping unstated; a floured pudding cloth or a buttered mould would both suit. Parchment under a loose foil tent, tied or crimped, does the same job and keeps condensation off the surface.
- Hard sauceNot cooked and not a pouring sauce: butter beaten with one to two times its weight in powdered sugar, flavoured with vanilla, brandy or nutmeg, then chilled firm. It melts over the hot slices at the table.
- YieldSix to eight slices, best cut warm with a serrated knife. Leftovers re-steam better than they reheat.
"Plum" in an English or American pudding almost never means the fresh fruit — from the seventeenth century onward it meant raisins, and it stuck fast in names like plum pudding, plum cake and this plum roll. Steamed rolls of this kind were the everyday cousin of the great boiled Christmas pudding: no suet, no brandy-soaked months of aging, just biscuit dough, dried fruit and half an hour over the kettle, which suited a kitchen where the range was already crowded. Recipes that lean on baking powder rather than yeast or long-beaten eggs reflect how thoroughly chemical leavening had reorganised plain home cookery. Hard sauce — a sweetened butter served cold against something hot — is generally traced to British pudding tradition, where a brandy-flavoured version is known as brandy butter.