Season's Eatings: Workshop teaches how to make plum pudding like Grandma's
The first things to know about plum pudding are that it has no plums and that it's more like a cake than a pudding. Another is that it impresses when, after bathing in alcohol and aging for months, it is set aflame. "Oh, wonderful," said Cindy Lincoln of Carver, after seeing the flickering blue flames in the darkened room at a recent Plimoth Plantation workshop on how to make this once popular English dessert.
A favorite of the English when they came to America, plum pudding is a rich dessert steamed and then aged, packed with spices, raisins and currants ñ the dried fruit which the English called "plum." The pudding was one of the classic dishes of the Christmas season in England, but the Puritans ate it at Thanksgiving, since they did not celebrate Christmas. In the 1800s, it became part of New England Christmases, until it fell out of favor in the 1950s.
"You can imagine a pudding like this warming the heart of 19th-century New Englanders at Thanksgiving and Christmas," said Kathleen Curtin, a Plimoth Plantation food historian who led the workshop. "It has a real old-fashioned flavor. There is nothing tastier than a lovely aged pudding in the depths of a cold New England winter."
The best plum pudding is prepared months in advance so that it has plenty of time to absorb the rum, bourbon or whiskey. Like a beloved plant or animal, the pudding is "fed" each week by pouring a quarter cup of alcohol on top. Stored in an earthenware pot or metal mold and wrapped in muslin, the pudding can "eat" for more than 12 months, since the alcohol and a cool, dry storage (a cold pantry or refrigerator are fine) preserve it.
"They just mellow and get richer and more lovely with age," Curtin said, adding that several months is sufficient.
Despite the continuing attention it requires, plum pudding is something even novice chefs can master.
"Puddings have a lot of mystique around them," Curtain said. "People get nervous, but they are a very forgiving thing to make."
Unlike a typical food workshop, the eight participants in this one didn't actually know what a homemade plum pudding tasted like, since they'd never had one. But they wanted to make one because of their interest in American history and traditional foods.
"We live in a 17th-century home, and we like to do the traditional crafts," said Denise Rittershaus of Pembroke, who came with her 17-year-old daughter, Hannah. "We've been coming to Plimoth Plantation since she was 2 and thought this would a fun thing to learn together. It's a little taste of what it was like in the past."
Of course, Curtin didn't try to duplicate the 17th-century cooking method, which involved placing the pudding in the cleaned out guts of a hog.
"The very first meaning of the word pudding is the insides of something, and the earliest types of pudding used the guts of a hog, sort of like a susage," Curtin explained. "By the time pudding got really popular in the 1800s, people cooked it in a basin."
Standing around a large table, each person prepared a pudding in a large metal bowl, starting with raisins and currants that had been macerating in rum. They then added more dried fruit and a dry mixture of flour, breadcrumbs, sugar, baking soda, salt and cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg. Then, they stirred in a wet mixture of eggs, milk and lemon juice, plus lemon rind and candied peel. After mixing, they transferred the pudding into an earthenware pot and tied muslin over it.
One ingredient above all recalls the origins of this pudding ñ the suet, which is fat from around the joints of a cow. Using a grater, the participants turned a chunk of solid white fat into a mound of flakes that looked like Ivory Snow. The flakes felt surprising dry and powdery, in contrast to the oily residue on people's hands.
Acknowledging that suet is the worst kind of saturated fat, Curtin said it can't be replaced with butter, margarine or lard.
"There is no substitute for it. If you use another kind of fat, you would get an oil slick on top, and the pudding wouldn't be as rich or have the same texture in the mouth," she explained. "But it's certainly not something you'd eat today all year, though up until the 1950s, people ate it all the time."
But vegetarians and the health-conscious still can enjoy a plum pudding by replacing the suet with egg yolks, although the results will be far inferior, she said.
Hannah Rittershaus at first thought the suet was "a little gross" but then decided it wasn't too bad, especially after she tasted the results. After eating the flaming pudding served at the end of the class, the chefs universally declared it delicious ñ and unusual.
"You really can't compare it to anything," said Lincoln, whose hobby is Revolutionary period re-enactments. "It's very nice."
Moist and dense, each mouthful is packed with the kick of spices, warmth of alcohol, richness of fat, and color of yellow raisins, red cranberries and brown currants.
Curtain served it with hard sauce, which is like a stiff white frosting that melts on the warm pudding and adds sweetness to its spiciness.
Holding her pudding pot, Lincoln was looking forward to getting home and steaming it.
"I will do my best to duplicate what I've learned," said Lincoln, who will serve the pudding on New Year's Eve. "It should be pretty soused by the time we eat it."
Jody Feinberg of The Patriot Ledger (Quincy, Mass.) can be reached at jfeinberg@ledger.com.
Get your fill of plum pudding
Another Plum Pudding Workshop will be offered from noon to 2 p.m. Monday at Plimoth Plantation. Cost is $85 for non-members and $60 for members. Registration deadline is tomorrow. To register, call 508-746-1622, Ext. 8114.
For more information, read "Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving Recipes and History, from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie," by Kathleen Curtin and Sandra L. Oliver Clarkson Potter, New York. October 2005.