Plum pudding

“ English plum pudding is not a food, it's a missile, and when eaten it is a concealed deadly weapon. I [Pg 20] want an American plum pudding. Mark well my words—an American plum pudding.
"And," he concluded, "if you can bring me these things, just so, without any strange African sauces or weird Oriental fixings or trans-Atlantic goo stirred into them or poured on to them or breathed upon them, I shall be very grateful to you, and in addition I shall probably make you independently wealthy for life." ”

“ There were immense plum puddings here at Christmas and also on all birthdays. My grandfather usually mentions them in his letters to my father. Thus, 26 December 1858, “The men were here yesterday: goose and plum pudding as usual. Bob had the key of the cider cellar and was butler; so, depend on it, there was no lack of cider. However, they all left in good order.” Again, 4 January 1846, “They were invited in yesterday on a famous piece of roasted pork and plum pudding, and drank the little creature’s good health. I believe they would be glad if Baby’s birthday came every month.” ”

“ We had a brace of prairie chickens also, but all interest was centred in the pudding. No one who has not been restricted entirely to one species of food for a long time can form any idea of the greedy158 eyes with which we viewed that plum pudding. It proved delicious beyond all anticipation, in spite of certain drawbacks in the shape of caps, buck-shot, and fragments of tobacco, which we discovered in it. ”

“ PUDDING, a term, now of rather wide application, for a dish consisting of boiled flour enclosing or containing meat, vegetables or fruit, or of batter, rice, sago or other farinaceous foods boiled or baked with milk and eggs. Properly a pudding should be one boiled in a cloth or bag. There are countless varieties, of which the most familiar are the Christmas plum-pudding, the Yorkshire pudding and the suet pudding. ”

“ A nice pudding may be made of bits of bread. They should be crumbled and soaked in milk over night. In the morning, beat up three eggs with it, add a little salt, tie it up in a bag, or in a pan that will exclude every drop of water, and boil it little more than an hour. No puddings should be put into the pot, till the water boils. Bread prepared in the same way makes good plum-puddings. Milk enough to make it quite soft; four eggs; a little cinnamon; a spoonful of rose-water, or lemon-brandy, if you have it; a tea-cupful of molasses, or sugar to your taste, if you prefer it ”

“ So bring in the pudding, if Susan's got one, Which will for a while one's appetite stay.
Mrs. Merdle Discourseth of Pudding. A pudding! why yes, as I live, too, it's plum; So plain, Susan makes them on purpose for me I never refuse, when the plum puddings come, To finish my dinner, if finished 't can be On things unsubstantial, like puddings and pies, So made up of suet, and currants, and flour, Like this one before us, to get up the size, And stirred up and beaten with eggs by the hour, With bread crumbs, and citron, and small piece of mace ”

“ He did not mistrust our willingness to give him a share of our plum-pudding, but he had a great desire to make one for himself, in fact, had brought with him flour for the purpose, and, being humoured with the other ingredients, he tied them up all in a cloth, and dropped his bundle very knowingly into the pot where the parson's pudding was already boiling. ”

“ In Poor Robin's Almanack for 1676, it [289] is observed of Christmas,—'Good cheer doth so abound as if all the world were made of minced-pies, plum pudding, and furmity.' And we might produce other quotations to show that, as the name 'hackin' fell into disuse about this period, it was generally supplanted by that of plum pudding."
Plum pudding is a truly national dish, and refuses to flourish out of England. It can obtain no footing in France. A Frenchman will dress like an Englishman, swear like an Englishman, and get drunk like an Englishman ”

“ The Grape thus becomes a Raisin, but it is still further [239] transformed when it reaches the cook; it then becomes a Plum, for Plum pudding has, as we all know, Raisins for its chief ingredient and certainly no Plums; and the Christmas pie into which Jack Horner put in his thumb and pulled out a Plum must have been a mince-pie, also made of Raisins; but how a cooked Raisin came to be called a Plum is not recorded. In Devonshire and Dorsetshire it undergoes a further transformation, for there Raisins are called Figs, and a Plum pudding is called a Fig pudding. ”

“ After the "raisin gliders," soup and a good stiff hoosh, Webb finished his observations while I recorded for him. It is wonderful what sledging does for the appetite. For the first week of the journey, the unaccustomed ration was too much for us; but now when Hurley announced "Pudding!" we were all still ravenous. It was a fine example of ye goode olde English plum-pudding, made from biscuit grated with the Bonsa-saw, fat picked out of the pemmican, raisins and glaxo-and-sugar, all boiled in an old food-bag. ”

“ We can find no reference to plum pudding in the diaries either of Evelyn or Pepys, and perhaps as early an instance as any of a Christmas plum pudding is in Round about our Coal Fire (1730?) : "In Christmas holidays the [Pg 175] tables were all spread from the first to the last; the sirloins of beef, the minced pies, the plum porridge, the capons, geese, turkeys, and plum puddings, were all brought upon the board."
Plum porridge is very frequently mentioned, and Brand gives an instance (vol. i. p. 296, note) of it being eaten in this century. "Memorandum. I dined at the Chaplain's Table at St. ”

“ In order to be prepared to meet the demand for their product, [445] manufacturers begin active operations as soon as the new crops of raisins, currants, and other required fruits appear in September. All the constituents of plum pudding, which do not include plums, are prepared and manipulated by elaborate and expensive machinery. Currants are washed and stems removed, raisins are stoned, nuts are shelled and ground, oranges and lemons are peeled, the peel candied and cut up, eggs are beaten, and all other ingredients prepared by machinery. ”

“ Plum puddings, when boiled, if hung up in a cool place in the cloth they are boiled in, will keep good some months; when wanted, take them out of the cloth, and put them into a clean cloth, and as soon as warmed through, they are ready. ”

“ Plum puddings are best when mixed an hour or two before they are boiled, as the various ingredients by that means incorporate, and the whole becomes richer and fuller of flavour, especially if the various ingredients be thoroughly well stirred together. ”

“ A quicker method, and one that gives practically the same results, is to stand the pudding in a saucepan containing boiling water to about half the depth of the mould or basin, the surrounding water being frequently replenished with more boiling water. A pudding to be steamed should not more than three-quarters fill the basin; and two folds of paper, made waterproof by being rubbed with butter or fat, should cover the top instead of a cloth, which prevents the pudding rising. ”

“ Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress next door to that! That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered, flushed, but smiling proudly, with the pudding like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top. ”

“ A bag made of two thicknesses of cheese-cloth, stitched together, will do. Always leave room in mold or bag for pudding to rise, using a smaller or larger mold according to quantity of pudding. If not boiled steadily, and emptied as soon as done, puddings will fall and stick.
ALMOND PUDDING Beat the yolks of four eggs very light with one-half cup of sugar; then add one-half cup of grated walnuts or almonds, one-half cup of grated white bread crumbs, then the stiffly-beaten whites of four eggs. Put in pudding form and steam from one and one-half to two hours. Serve with wine or fruit sauce. ”

“ Great care must always be taken to prevent either the writing paper or the cloth tied over the pudding from touching the water when it is steamed in the manner directed above, a method which is preferable to boiling, if the preceding directions be attended to, particularly for puddings of this class. The corners of the cloth or muslin should be gathered up and fastened over the pudding; but neither a large nor a heavy cloth should be used for the purpose at any time. ”

“ We cut the candied peel as thin as we wish people would cut our bread-and-butter. We tried to take the stones out of the raisins, but they were too sticky, so we just divided them up in seven lots. Then we mixed the other things in the wash-hand basin from the spare bedroom that was always spare. We each put in our own lot of raisins and turned it all into a pudding-basin, and tied it up in one of Alice's pinafores, which was the nearest thing to a proper pudding-cloth we could find—at any rate clean. ”

“ All meat puddings should be served in the basins in which they are boiled, a napkin being neatly folded round. The carver should remove a round piece from the lid of the pudding, and pour in enough of the broth from the sauce boat to fill it up; this will ensure each person getting the same kind of gravy. This pudding may be made of sheep’s head after it has been boiled. To make the crust for a richer pudding, use equal quantities of suet and flour. Mix a pinch of salt with the flour and suet, make into a paste with cold water in the proportion of 1⁄2 pint to 1 lb. ”

“ You dare not be lowly in the night in the kitchen, because of the beetles. We were aroused by a horrible smell. It was the pudding-cloth burning. All the water had secretly boiled itself away. We filled it up at once with cold, and the saucepan cracked. So we cleaned it and put it back on the shelf and took another and went to bed. You see what a lot of trouble we had over the pudding. Every evening till Christmas, which had now become only the day after to-morrow, we sneaked down in the inky midnight and boiled that pudding for as long as it would. ”

“ Prunes, or French plums, make a fine pudding instead of raisins, either with suet or bread pudding.—Another and richer. Pour half a pint of scalding milk, on half a pint of bread crumbs, and cover it up for an hour. Beat up four eggs, and when strained, add to the bread, with a tea-spoonful of flour, an ounce of butter, two ounces of sugar, half a pound of currants, an ounce of almonds beaten with orange-flower water, half an ounce of orange, of lemon, and of citron. Butter a bason that will exactly hold it, flour the cloth, tie it tight over, and boil the pudding an hour. ”

“ As for Cheese-cakes, Custards, Tansies, they are manifest Puddings, and all of Sir John’s own Contrivance; for Custard is as old if not older than Magna Charta. In short, Pudding is of the greatest Dignity and Antiquity. Bread it self, which is the very Staff of Life, is, properly speaking, a Bak’d Wheat-Pudding.
To the Satchel, which is the Pudding-Bag of Ingenuity, we are indebted for the greatest Men in Church and State. All Arts and Sciences owe their Original to Pudding or Dumpling. What is a Bag-Pipe, the Mother of all Music, but a Pudding of Harmony. ”

“ Groat Pudding.—Boil raspberries or red currants, press and strain the juice. To 1 pint this add 1 pint red wine, and set it on the fire with ample sugar to sweeten. When it boils sprinkle in 1⁄4 lb. coarsely-ground corn, barley, or groats; stir this till it thickens and is done, then put it into a wetted mould; when quite cold, turn it out on a dish. Any fruit sauce may be poured over it. The same red pudding may be made with rice, nudels, or sago. It should turn out of the mould in a jelly, but not too stiff. ”

“ I wish, Elizabeth, you would tell me some new puddings. Archie says ours are so dull."
Elizabeth immediately threw herself into the subject of puddings.
"I know one new pudding, but it takes two days to make and it's very expensive. We only have it for special people. You know 'Aunt Mag,' of course? and 'Uncle Tom'? That's only 'Aunt Mag' with treacle. Semolina, sago, big rice—we call those milk things, we don't dignify them by the name of pudding. What else is there? Tarts, oh! and bread puddings, and there's that greasy kind you eat with syrup, suet dumplings. ”

“ PUDDINGS AND PASTRY, familiar as they may be, and unimportant as they may be held in the estimation of some, are yet intimately connected with the development of agricultural resources in reference to the cereal grasses. When they began to be made is uncertain; but we may safely presume, that a simple form of pudding was amongst the first dishes made after discovering a mode of grinding wheat into flour. Traditional history enables us to trace man back to the time of the Deluge. ”

“ If the water diminishes, always replenish with some, hot in a jug, as the pudding should be kept covered all the time, and not allowed to stop boiling. When the cloth is removed, cut out a round piece in the top of the crust, to prevent the pudding bursting, and send it to table in the basin, either in an ornamental dish, or with a napkin pinned round it. ”

“ I suppose the hair-oil must have been the Brown Windsoriness of the soap coming out. We were sorry, but it was still our duty to get rid of the pudding. The Quaggy was handy, it is true, but when you have collected money to feed poor children and spent it on pudding it is not right to throw that pudding in the river. People do not subscribe shillings and sixpences and half-crowns to feed a hungry flood with Christmas pudding. ”