Aunt Annie’s Plum Duff (Plum Pudding)

~ White House Red Door

Plum Pudding is a traditional Christmas dessert and very common in Two plum puddings decorated with holly sprigs.England and Ireland. For Americans, the name itself is rather confusing as this dessert contains neither plums nor is it a pudding in the Jell-O sense of the word. The “plums” are actually a pre-Victorian term for raisins and pudding is a reference to dessert in general. Some compare plum pudding to fruit cake, but I respectfully disagree. My family’s plum pudding is not heavy and dense like a fruitcake. It is light in texture, but very rich in flavor; heady with cinnamon, cloves, mace, and brandy.  Served with a dollop of chilled hard sauce which begins melting as soon as it hits the warm pudding… it’s like tasting Christmas.

As I discovered during research, plum pudding has a lot of history. Dating back to medieval times, it is a steamed or boiled cake traditionally made on the Sunday before Advent begins. This generous lead time (and a bit of brandy) allows the cake to “ripen” during the weeks before Christmas. In addition to raisins, the cake contains nuts, breadcrumbs, sugar, suet, eggs, milk, brandy, and spices. The highlight of Christmas dinner, the pudding is steamed again to warm through, doused with more brandy, topped with a sprig of holly and set ablaze just as it’s presented to guests.

My family’s plum pudding recipe dates back over 100 years. Aunt Annie, born in the 1880s, was my grandmother’s aunt. Though I don’t know where she got the recipe, I do know that my grandmother made it Two plum pudding moldsthroughout my father’s childhood, and then passed the recipe on to my mother, who continues to make it to this day. The handwritten recipe from my grandmother refers to the pudding as “Aunt Annie’s Plum Duff.” It seems that centuries ago, the pudding would have been steamed or boiled in cloth, but during the Victorian era the cloth was replace by pudding molds. That said, modern recipes for “duff” do exist and usually instruct the reader to boil the pudding in cloth rather than “pudding” recipes that use a mold. Perhaps my great great aunt originally boiled her pudding in cloth? Unfortunately, I’ll never know. What I do know is that my grandmother steamed her puddings in coffee cans lined with buttered wax paper. And today, I use pudding molds.

This year, the pudding almost didn’t happen. It is getting tougher and IMG_8488tougher to find suet (NOT the kind you get at the garden store to feed the birds). I actually stumbled across some quite by chance at a butcher shop in Boston just a couple of weeks ago. The other ingredients are pretty standard pantry items, and though it’s a two day process, most of the time is hands-off and the technique is very easy. Once the mixture is in the molds, they are steamed for a couple of hours and cooled. After cooling, they are removed from the molds. The molds are washed, the puddings rewrapped in clean parchment, returned to the molds, splashed with more brandy, and tucked away in the fridge until Christmas Day. Before serving, the pudding is steamed again to warm through. Hard Sauce is passed along with it… a creamy combination of butter, confectioners sugar, and- you guessed it, more brandy!

What does it say about me as a child that even then I loved Aunt Annie’s Plum Duff? I knew that this was no ordinary dessert… a generations old recipe, a “cake” steamed in coffee cans on the stove, then steamed again and served with a boozy butter + sugar concoction, plus the whole operation completed a month in advance. This was definitely not happening at my friends’ houses.

I am so grateful for this splattered and tattered heirloom recipe, a direct connection to my past, written in my grandmother’s hand. If you are up for an old fashioned dessert, do try this. You don’t even need to light it on fire… but if you do, please have a fire extinguisher nearby. Safety first!

Aunt Annie’s Plum Duff (Plum Pudding)

  • Servings: 2 puddings
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Ingredients:
2½ cups of raisins
1 cup finely chopped fresh white beef suet (pick apart and remove membrane, then chop)
1 cup chopped walnuts
1½ jiggers brandy (4½ Tablespoons)
4 cups lightly packed breadcrumbs (large loaf of day old bread, crusts removed, and pulled apart)
2 cups milk to which 2 teaspoons baking soda has been added
2 eggs, well beaten
1 cup packed brown sugar
1½ teaspoons cinnamon
1½ teaspoons ground cloves
¼ teaspoon mace

Instructions:
Combine raisins, suet, walnuts, and brandy. Mix well, cover, and refrigerate overnight.

The next day-
Butter molds and line with parchment paper.

Combine breadcrumbs, raisin-walnut mixture, milk, eggs, brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and mace. Mix well.

Carefully spoon pudding mixture into lined molds, filling 2/3 full. Top each with another piece of parchment, then covered with lids. If you have extra pudding, it can be steamed in a buttered mason jar.

Steam in gently simmering water for 2 hours. Maintain water level so that it comes halfway up the sides of the molds.

Serve warm with hard sauce or soft custard sauce.

The pudding can be eaten the same day, but traditionally it is allowed to “ripen” for at least a week, or as long as a year. If you aren’t serving it right away, remove molds from water and allow to cool. Carefully remove puddings from molds, peeling away parchment. Thoroughly wash and dry and molds, then reline with parchment and return puddings to molds. Drizzle a splash of brandy on top of each, cover with additional piece of parchment and place lids on top. Refrigerate until ready to use. Before serving, steam puddings again for 2-3 hours. Serve with hard sauce* or soft custard sauce.

*recipe follows below

Raisins, chopped walnuts, suet, and brandy
Raisins, chopped walnuts, suet, and brandy are ready to mingle.
Raisins, walnuts, suet and brandy mixture
Mix the raisins, walnuts, suet, and brandy. Cover and refrigerate overnight. You’re done for today.
Ingredients laid out for plum pudding.
After the raisins, suet, and walnuts have soaked overnight in brandy,  it’s time to make the pudding.
IMG_8459
Add the breadcrumbs and spices.  Mix well.
Eggs and milk are added to the raisin/walnut mixture.
Add the well beaten eggs and milk (don’t forget to put the 2 teaspoons of baking soda in the milk!)
Pudding mixture is ready to go into the molds.
The pudding mixture is ready for the molds.
Pudding Mixture in Molds
Carefully spoon pudding mixture into parchment lined molds, filling 2/3 of way up.
Parchment paper is place on top of each pudding before steaming.
Place an additional piece of pleated parchment paper on top of each pudding. The pleats allow room for the pudding to expand as it steams.
Plum pudding molds on top of a rack set in boiling water.
Place the molds on a rack set in gently boiling water. The water should come halfway up the sides of the molds. Cover and gently boil for 2 hours. Keep checking water level and replace as needed to maintain a height of halfway up the sides of the molds. In this picture you see a regular mold and a foil topped mason jar. I had a small amount of pudding mixture left over, so I steamed it in a buttered 8oz sized mason jar, rubber banded with foil. The other mold was boiling away in a separate pot.
Plum Pudding after boiling for two hours.
Two hours later…
Plum Pudding after two hours boiling.
the big reveal!
Plum Pudding
Plum Pudding
Two plum puddings decorated with holly sprigs.
Plum Puddings

Hard Sauce

Ingredients:
1½ cups powdered sugar
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
brandy or whisky to taste

Instructions:
Using an electric mixer, cream sugar and butter. Add brandy or whisky to taste.

Transfer to a small bowl, cover, and refrigerate until ready to use. Remove from the fridge about 30 minutes before serving. The hard sauce should be still be cool and firm, but easy enough to scoop.

29 thoughts on “Aunt Annie’s Plum Duff (Plum Pudding)”

  1. Love the molds! How did you get the puddings to release so well? I tried my hand at plum pudding a week or two ago (blog post to come) and despite generous buttering it still left some scraps behind in the mold.

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    1. Thanks so much for your comment! I buttered the molds, lined them with parchment paper, then filled them. After they steamed for 2 hours, I set the molds aside for a little while, then removed the puddings + parchment while they were still slightly warm. The parchment just peeled away. Did you line your molds with parchment?

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  3. I love seeing the recipe! so special. Wow I never knew what plum duff was or that it had no plums in it! This is so special having been in your family for so long! Thanks for being willing to share it with us! I love this beautiful recipe!

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  5. I’ve never had plum pudding but have always wanted to try it. I love your recipe, your molds, your presentation, It really does look like Christmas on a plate. Love that it is splashed with Brandy a few times including the hard sauce. What a lovely recipe and interesting to know a little about the history, Happy Holidays.

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  8. I love this. 🙂 I wish I had the time to try out the recipe this year but unfortunately I have very little free time between now and Christmas. I’ve always wanted to try making my own Christmas pudding. We always cheat and buy one. Maybe next year. 😀

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    1. It is a crazy busy week! I was lucky enough to come across the suet, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to make the pudding; I only wish I’d found it earlier, so the post would have been up with plenty of time to spare. Next year, a repost is order… Have a very Merry Christmas!

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  10. Sorry it took me so long to get here. A terrible cold, my parents just got here from Rome, holiday madness, you name it! 😉
    Anyway, this post is simply great! Your pudding looks and sounds delicious, your molds are beautiful beyond any description and the handwritten recipe … absolutely precious. That’s what Christmas should look like!

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    1. Thank you! I hope you have a wonderful Christmas with your family, especially with your mom and dad visiting from Rome… it must be extra special! (Will you be celebrating the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve? My husband is of Italian descent, so we’re having seafood on the 24th. Yum!)

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  11. I love the name ‘plum duff’. It’s one that was used a lot during my childhood instead of plum pudding , or Christmas pudding. In the 1950s I was taught at school how to make various types of suet puddings. Some were boiled in a cloth – like jam roly-poly. Others were steamed in a pudding basin – which is how we did Christmas puddings. I haven’t made my own for many years now (time constraints, as you aptly say). Suet is still availble here, but it was one of the fats almost demonised a ew years ago, as were all saturated/animal fats. Now thoughts are changing again about them, and we’re told we do need some in our daily diet. Your Aunt Annie’s recipe looks lovely, as does the finished pudding.

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