Plum Pudding Day

What the day is

Plum Pudding Day is observed on February 12. The pudding contains no plums, which is the first thing worth explaining.

Origin and background

Before the eighteenth century, plum in English cooking meant any dried fruit, and raisins in particular. A plum pudding is therefore a raisin pudding, and the name simply outlived the usage. The same fossilized meaning survives in plum cake and in the sugarplum, which is not a plum either.

The dish descends from something considerably stranger. Medieval pottages called plum porridge or frumenty were savory, combining meat broth, dried fruit, spices and grain into a thick soup eaten at feasts. Over generations the meat receded to suet alone, the grain became breadcrumbs, the mixture stiffened, and what had been a soup became a solid pudding boiled in a cloth and later in a basin.

The suet is doing real work. It melts at a higher temperature than butter, so it holds its shape long enough for the structure around it to set before dispersing, which produces the open, moist, slightly crumbly texture that butter cannot replicate in a steamed pudding.

Long steaming is the other requirement. Hours of gentle moist heat break down the fruit and gelatinize the starch without drying anything out, and the high sugar and alcohol content means a finished pudding keeps for months, improving as it matures.

The flaming at table is ethanol burning off the surface, which is why the spirit must be warmed first. Cold spirit does not release enough vapor to catch.

How to take part

• Steam it properly rather than microwaving. The texture depends on slow moist heat.
• Use suet, or a vegetarian equivalent, rather than substituting butter.
• Warm the brandy before lighting it, and stand back.
• Make one well ahead. A month of maturing genuinely improves it.
• Look up a medieval plum porridge recipe to see the savory ancestor.