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]

Reminds me of a nursery rhyme - (which Google seems unable to find amongst all the recipes)

One plum duff,
Quite enough,
Eating too much pudding,
Makes you blow and puff!

[igenlode]

Plum duff (made on board ship with molasses) was a traditional sailors' staple, along with lobscouse etc. Makes sense, I suppose, because like all those mediæval recipes it's a dish that is boiled rather than baked, and a ship's cook was handling huge pots rather than ovens.

I tried eating the leftovers as a cold dessert and found that it had become very dense, as is the way of suet puddings -- I must remember to reheat the other one before eating!

I'm intrigued by this 1930s recipe for a potato duff, which uses no flour at all...

[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...)

[watervole]

I imagine the individual messes were basically for serving food from the galley. Whether they had their own supply of some items, I don't know.

Just for interest: The term slush fund was originally a nautical term: the slush was the fat or grease skimmed from the top of the cauldron when boiling salted meat. Ship officers would sell the fat to tallow makers, with the resulting proceeds kept as a slush fund for making small purchases for the ship's crew.

[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!