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

[igenlode]

In "The Last Grain Race" (as late as the 1930s), Eric Newby describes the two watches -- which were basically one 'mess' each -- being issued with weekly rations of condensed milk, margarine (1lb per head per week) and sugar (ditto). ("One Saturday afternoon [we were given] an 8-lb canister of Flett's plum-and-apple jam. By supper-time on Sunday the eight of us had eaten it.") The other food was dished up meal by meal.

The individual crew members could also invest in private treats, if they could keep them; Newby paid for two tins of canned peaches, and was given a stock of home-made jam by his mother and sister, most of which was stolen from his trunk by his messmates over the course of the voyage.


In "Around the Horn Before the Mast", Basil Lubbock mentions that the cook was known as "Old Slush".

I was very sceptical about the derivation for "Slush fund", since it sounds like a classic piece of folk etymology -- along with the claim that the term 'cock up' comes from the nautical activities of the 'cock-up gang', who were employed to cant the ship's yards... apart from the fact that it doesn't appear as an epithet until well after the supposed activities of these sailors, and there is no record of any such band of men -- but in fact it seems to be genuine. As it, there are citations from nineteenth-century publications using the phrase in the sense of ship's funds well before the OED notes it as an American political term in the 1920s...

[watervole]

I'm just reading a collection of Wartime songs, and one of them mentions plum and apple jam.
I believe it was cheap to make as apples were easy to come by, and the army got rather fed up of it.

Tickler's jam, Tickler's jam,
How I love old Tickler's jam,
Plum and apple in a one pound pot,
Sent from Blighty in a ten ton lot,
Every night when I'm asleep,
I'm dreaming that I am,
Forcing my way through the Dardanelles,
With a ton of Tickler's jam.

[igenlode]

The apples would be cheap padding for the stoned fruit, I imagine. You can make apple & apricot jam with 2/3 apples to 1/3 apricots, although you have to wait until the tail-end of the apricot season (or use dried).

I have a wartime recipe for 'apple and orange marmalade' in order to make the most of any orange peel left over from your small child's occasional small orange -- no such thing as a supply of Sevilles for marmalade-making!