Plum Duff

[igenlode]

I used some of my left-over white rolls to make a Plum Duff (from the modern National Trust cookbook of Traditional Puddings, so not strictly speaking vintage).


It uses a relatively small amount of flour and sugar and lightens the suet pudding with breadcrumbs, while sweetening it with dried fruit (the 'plums' pulled out by Little Jack Horner) and tart jam; the recipe wanted redcurrant jelly, but I didn't have any, so used bramble jelly. The result resembles Christmas pudding visually (as do almost all steamed puddings), but in the absence of spices, chopped nuts, citrus peel, etc. it tastes quite different, and is much less dense in texture.

The recipe wanted a two-pint bowl, but I couldn't find anything larger than one and a half pints, so I ended up making two one-pint puddings instead. When they were busy steaming (in two separate saucepans, since not even my biggest pan was quite big enough for two one-pint bowls side by side), a two-pint bowl duly turned up in the washing-up -- I'd used it to mix the salad in at lunch-time!

The recipe recommends custard or lemon sauce, made with cream and lemon curd. I had mine with the cheaper and easier marmalade sauce, made with a tablespoon of Seville marmalade boiled up in a little water ;-p
Works with almost any kind of jam; in an ideal world you dilute the jam with lemon juice rather than water, sieve out any lumps, and thicken the sauce with arrowroot, but in fact simply thinning the jam with water and boiling it up for a short while makes a perfectly serviceable sauce for steamed or sponge puddings.

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I wrote a couple of paragraphs of beginning for my Harry Potter flashfic, attempting to establish (and explain) the setting in a standalone way, and posted it to AO3 under the title of Appraisal -- having forgotten until the last moment that I was going to need a title at all!

Comments

[watervole]

I think most people have no idea of how a cauldron was used for cooking - I didn't until relatively recently.

Individual sealed containers were placed in it and all cooked at the same time.

See the illustration on https://britishfoodhistory.com/2020/10/31/cauldron-cooking/

I read the book it's taken from a few years ago, and have often considered getting my own copy.

[igenlode]

Interesting -- no, I had no idea. So it's more of a complete stove than a single container.

I did wonder whether ship's cooks would be trying to boil a single gigantic duff and serving it up to everybody at once; in the case of a merchant ship, where the crews were much smaller, they probably did. But for a man of war I imagine they would have boiled up one pudding per mess, and had them all bobbing around separately.

(They probably did dish out the various forms of stewed meat from a vast communal pot...)

[watervole]

Yes, you would cook the entire meal in the cauldron.

One pudding per mess, I imagine, but I'm not sure as fire was a big risk on ships, so maybe done in the galley.

Read Lobscouse and Spotted Dick

https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/category/all?search=Lobscouse%20and%20Spotted%20Dog if you want to learn about cooking at sea...

[igenlode]

I'm certain the puddings were cooked in the galley and not in each individual mess -- it was the only place fire was allowed† on board ship, at least in a warship laden with gunpowder and flammable items! And also, it takes hours to cook a suet pudding, and you couldn't possibly occupy all the crew's mess area all that time.

† (To be fair, they were obviously allowed lanterns for purposes of illumination, so literal flames did exist elsewhere...)