“Shall we go through?” Christmas Plum Pudding Edition (Unlocked)

the latest installment in my series on proper dining

Originally published for paying subscribers December 19, 2021. Unlocked now for all my subscribers!

This week, I took a deeper dive than I ever have before into the mind and kitchen of Miss E. Neil.

And, at first, I was overwhelmed.

For those of you who don’t remember, Miss E. Neil was the author of a cookbook from the 1890s given to me by my grandmother. It’s full of everything from fascinating and often forgotten recipes to home remedies and advice for life.

I was looking for a recipe that did not involve, like in the case of her recipe for Mock-Turtle Soup, cleaning and washing a calf’s head, splitting it in two, and saving the brains.

I’m just not brave enough.

But should I delve into her breakfast recipe for “American Toast,” which upon further inspection was revealed to be a recipe for what we would now refer to as French Toast?

Too tame.

Or perhaps I should start with Potato Soup, which was touted as “suitable for a cold day.” But this recipe required that I “Get as many beef or ham bones as you can, and smash them into fragments. Add a little bit of lean ham to give flavor. Boil the bone and ham for two hours and a half at least.”

Where exactly does one get bones nowadays without taking them from the calf’s head after boiling it for several hours and saving the brains? Come to think of it, where would one even get the calf’s head?

I realized that I was jumping into a world far more different from my own than I had originally thought. The home cooks that were to glean from the lessons of Miss E. Neil were to emerge with knowledge that I imagine now only belongs to pupils of five-star French chefs cooking in a land that I picture to be brimming with calf’s heads and things like lard and graham flour.

The world of Miss E. Neil was a harsher world than my own. Stoves and ovens were things of great power and great pain. Cooking something meant that the range had to be kept at the same sustained temperature for hours at a time. And this meant that someone had to add wood and tend to the fire to keep the heat up. But be careful — if you added too much wood, the metal of the stove itself could melt! Go to market and buy only what’s in season to save money and minimize your chances of buying something rancid, but keep both eyes peeled, because, if you’re living in London, the fog, which we now call “smog,” is so thick from everyone’s stoves that you might walk straight into a wall and not even know it. This article on Victorian kitchens and homemaking gives a wonderful peek into the kitchens of old and even mentions a “Sherlock Holmes” story in which a character must light a match in broad daylight to read a note in the fogs of London.

Feeling cowardly and very much out of my depth, I closed the cookbook and sat back in defeat.

Then I remembered an episode of “The Great British Bakeoff.”

In this season three episode, the bakers are challenged to make game pies, a staple of Victorian dinner tables, tennis cakes, which are exactly what they sound like — cakes decorated to look like a tennis court, net included, and Charlotte Russe. I’ve always been fascinated by this episode. I learned many things from it, like how Victorian social-climbers prided themselves on the fanciness of their pie tins and how Royal Icing came to be called “royal” because Queen Victoria used it on her own wedding cake. I also learned that “plum” was merely a catch-all term for fruit and could be used to refer to any variety or mix of fruit in a dessert.

The bakers in GBBO had a difficult time with these challenges. They were working with ingredients with which they were often unfamiliar, baking in styles that were lost to history.

But if they could do it, so could I. And I opened up the cookbook again with determination.

I was also heavily reminded while searching for the perfect recipe of Mrs. Patmore from “Downton Abbey.” And as I flipped past dishes called things like “Spiced Salmon (Pickled)” and “Quick Sally Lunn,” I remembered something — the only dishes that they really talk about on the show, other than things that involve pheasants and quail’s eggs, which I imagine are only included in the script to show the wealth of our friends the Crawleys, are desserts.

And how different can a nineteenth-century cake be from a twenty-first century one?

With the spirit of Mrs. Patmore alive and well within me and the Victorian episode of GBBO playing on the TV in the kitchen, I set to work going through the dessert section of the book.

As I flipped past a birthday cake recipe with eighteen eggs in it, I remembered a recent Instagram post by one of my favorite contestants from the GBBO episode mentioned above, Flora Shedden, who posted in mid-November about her first ever attempt at making Christmas pudding.

Bingo. I found Miss E. Neil’s recipe for “Christmas Plum Pudding” immediately.

Christmas pudding is not a very popular thing in America, but it’s reportedly a staple of British Decembers. A true Christmas pudding is made in November, cooled and stored in a dark place, and fed with brandy or whiskey until Christmas day. I also found out during my pudding research that a true, well-fed Christmas pudding can last up to two years because of the (extremely, very merry) high alcohol content.

My first step after finding the recipe was to modernize and Americanize the recipe. The measurements were in pounds and ounces and many of them were also hard to come by.

Here’s a picture of the original recipe:

I refuse on principal to use suet, which for those who are blissfully ignorant is the raw fat from around animal kidneys, so I decided to substitute Crisco for that (be sure to put it in the freezer about thirty minutes before you need it). I couldn’t find citron in my local mountain-town grocery store, so I substituted orange zest. For mace, which I learned from GBBO is not only an effective tool of self-defense but also a classic Victorian spice made from the outside of the nutmeg seed, I substituted allspice. Cherries were substituted for currants to keep the light bitterness but nix the hard-to-find ingredient. And I’d heard that whiskey gives the puddings a smokier flavor than brandy, and we had a bottle on hand, so that was substituted for the brandy.

While I had to get inventive and use these glass storage dishes, I’ve heard that it’s much better to use pudding molds. Whatever you decide to use, make sure you pick a dish that is heat-safe and not too wide or deep (the ones I used were about two inches deep and about three inches across).

Many other tweaks and method-streamlinings have been done to Miss E. Neil’s original recipe. But I hope that I have succeeded in two things — making this recipe more accessible to modern home cooks and keeping the original flavor and integrity of the dish intact. It does, and I suspect always has, tasted exactly as Christmas should.

Christmas Plum Pudding

a modernized delight

You will need:

1 cup butter

1 cup shortening (frozen for about 30 minutes)

1 cup sugar

4 1/2 cups flour

4 cups raisins, coarsely chopped and coated in 2 Tablespoons flour

2 cups dried cherries, coarsely chopped and coated in 1 Tablespoon flour

Zest from 1 orange

6 eggs, separated

1 cup milk

1/2 cup whiskey (I used Buffalo Trace and it gave it an AMAZING flavor)

2 teaspoons ground cloves

2 teaspoons nutmeg

2 teaspoons allspice

Parchment paper

Aluminum foil

8-10 pudding molds (or other heat-safe glass container)

Roasting pan or large pots with lids

What to do:

Chop the raisins and cherries, place them in a large bowl and coat them in the flour (I put all the fruit in the bowl, spooned the flour in, and mixed it up with a fork). Next, crack and separate the eggs, whites into one bowl, yolks into another. Whisk the egg whites until they turn a faint white in color and have lots of air in them. Whisk the yolks with a fork just until they are smooth.

Then, chop the frozen shortening into cubes and cream it together with the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl (I used a whisk attachment for this). Beat the egg yolks into this mixture. Mix in the milk.

Next, add in the flour one cup at a time, mixing well. In between each addition of a cup of flour, add some of the beaten egg whites until all of both the flour and egg whites have been added and mixed in. Add in the whiskey and orange zest along with the cloves, nutmeg, and allspice (this is the part where it starts to smell incredible).

Change out the attachment on your mixer for the regular mixing attachment (or use a spoon) and mix in the fruit until it is evenly distributed.

Lightly butter your pudding molds, then coat the butter with flour. This will make it easier to get the pudding out of the molds. Fill the buttered and floured molds with the pudding mixture almost to the top.

Next, set one large pan or several pots boiling with water on the stove. I used a turkey roasting pan on my stovetop similar to this one because it is best to have a wire rack on the bottom of the pan. If you don’t have a roasting pan, you can also place a dish towel in the bottom of the pot before you start boiling the water and put the molds on top of that as they boil. Whatever you use, make sure you have a lid for it! You’ll want to make sure to fill your pan or pot high enough that the water will reach about 3/4 up the sides of your molds.

While you are waiting for the water to boil, cut out squares of parchment paper large enough to completely cover the tops of your molds (it should just fold over the sides). Place these on top of your molds. Next, cover each parchment- topped mold with aluminum foil from the top down, making sure to completely cover the bottoms. Then cover the molds again in aluminum foil, this time starting from the bottom and wrapping it into a crease at the top, almost forming a handle. This will ensure that no water can get into the actual pudding.

Once the water is boiling and the puddings are sealed with foil, place them in the pan or pot onto either the metal rack at the bottom or the dish towel you’ve placed at the bottom. Cover the pan with a lid leaving a small gap at the top to let out a bit of the steam (otherwise it will whistle like a kettle the entire time you’re boiling the puddings) and let boil for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

Make sure to check the water level in your pan every 30 minutes or so. Don’t let the water level drop below halfway up the pudding molds, and don’t let the water stop boiling!

You should start to smell the puddings at around 1 hour. Start checking the puddings at 1 1/2 hours. Do this by sticking a metal skewer all the way through the foil, parchment, and pudding to the bottom of the mold. Before you pull the skewer back out, make sure to wiggle it a bit at the top to make the opening larger, otherwise the foil will scrape off any pudding and make you think they’re done before they actually are. When the skewer comes out of the pudding completely clean, you know it’s done.

When the puddings are done, remove them from the water with tongs and put them on a cooling rack. Immediately unwrap them from the foil and let them cool on the racks uncovered.

When my mom tasted it, she thought it was delicious (a sure sign that something is truly and deeply good), but thought it would benefit from a whiskey sauce. I agree. If you’re feeling extra fancy, make a whiskey sauce to serve over the pudding by making my personal whiskey sauce this way:

In a small saucepan, combine 1/2 cup white sugar, 1/2 cup butter, and 1/2 cup heavy cream. Stir with a whisk over low heat until butter has melted. Stir in 1 Tablespoon orange zest and 1 Tablespoon fresh-squeezed orange juice and 1/4 cup whiskey. Allow to froth, stirring constantly with a whisk over low heat for two minutes, or until the sauce thickens and darkens slightly.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading. And if you find yourself, as I was, feeling a lack of courage to tackle such a daunting task as a Christmas Pudding, remember Miss E. Neil’s advice on courage, found in the back of the book under the section labelled “Miscellaneous,” which also includes advice on how to dust a room and keep your children from growing up selfish:

“One may possess physical courage, so that in times of danger, a railroad accident, a steamboat collision, or a runaway horse, the heart will not be daunted or the cheek paled, while, on the other hand, one may be morally brave, not afraid to speak a word for the right, in season, though unwelcome, to perform a disagreeable duty unflinchingly, or to refuse to do a wrong act, and yet be a physical coward, trembling and terrified in a thunderstorm, timid in the dark, and even scream at the sight of a mouse. Courage, both moral and physical, is one of the finest attributes of character, and both can be cultivated and gained, if desired, and sought after.”

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Join me next time for more good recipes for cold days. January will include my Hungarian Mushroom Soup and some more adventurous recipes inspired by events and flavors from all over the world (I’m looking at you, Chinese New Year)!

Until then, Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year,

Juliana

PS —

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