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Ingoldsby Xmas Pudding
(England.) Mix 1 pound raisins, 1 pound currants, 1 pound of sugar, of flour, of suet and bread-crumbs. Add 1/4 ounce each of candied peel, allspice, a little nutmeg, and rind of a lemon, 8 eggs, well beaten, 2 glasses of brandy or rum. This makes two large puddings. Boil each in a bag, for 7 hours, and serve with blazing wine sauce.
A classic Victorian boiled plum pudding, written in the compressed shorthand of its day. The list means one pound each of raisins, currants, sugar, flour, suet and breadcrumbs, which is where most of the confusion starts.
- Reading the ingredient list"1 pound of sugar, of flour, of suet and bread-crumbs" means a pound of each, not a pound divided among them. With the fruit that is six pounds of dry mixture before the eggs and spirit go in, hence two large puddings.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded or grated fine and tossed with a little of the flour so it stays separate. Packaged shredded suet works; vegetarian suet gives a slightly heavier crumb. Butter is not a substitute here, as suet melts later in the cooking and leaves the open texture the pudding depends on.
- The quarter-ounce of peelA quarter ounce of candied peel against six pounds of pudding is very little, and may be an error or an extreme economy; comparable puddings often call for several ounces. The quarter ounce of allspice is about 7 g, roughly three level teaspoons ground, which is reasonable as written.
- Glasses of brandyA "glass" in period cookery books is a wine glass, roughly two fluid ounces, so about half a cup of spirit total. Modern wine glasses are much larger and will make the batter too loose.
- Boiling in a bagA scalded, floured pudding cloth tied loosely enough to allow swelling, or a buttered basin covered with pleated parchment and foil and tied under the rim. The pot must stay at a steady simmer for the full seven hours and be topped up with boiling water so the pudding is never uncovered; cold water added mid-cook will make it sodden.
- Seven hours is not paddingThe long boil is what turns raw suet and flour into the dark, close crumb of a Christmas pudding. What can be shortened is the reheat: a made pudding needs only one to two hours of steaming on the day.
- KeepingPuddings of this kind were commonly made ahead, the sugar, fat and spirit helping them keep. Cool completely, re-cover with fresh cloth or parchment, and store somewhere cool and dry.
- Blazing wine sauceThe recipe calls for the sauce itself to be set alight: a sweetened wine or spirit sauce, warmed and lit as it goes to table. Warm the spirit first, keep the ladle away from the bottle, and stand the dish clear of anything overhead.
- YieldEach of the two puddings serves twelve to sixteen; this is very rich food.
The name points to The Ingoldsby Legends, the wildly popular collection of comic and macabre verse published from the late 1830s by Richard Harris Barham under the pen name Thomas Ingoldsby. Attaching a literary name to a Christmas pudding need not be a claim of authorship; Victorian puddings and other dishes were often named after places, people and institutions. The dish itself descends from plum pottage, a spiced meat-and-fruit broth thickened with breadcrumbs, which over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lost its meat and kept its suet, dried fruit and spice until it set firm enough to be tied in a cloth and boiled. By the time this recipe was collected, the boiled Christmas pudding was a fixed emblem of English domestic Christmas, which is why a book of foreign recipes labels it simply "(England.)"