VICTORIAN PLUM PUDDING ( Dated Dec.6th, 2009)

"Hallo! a great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating house and a pastry-cook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding...like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half a quarter of ignited brandy, and bedlight with Christmas Holly stuck to the top."~Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

4 slices of bread torn in pieces
2 cups of beef suet, ground
1 cup brown sugar
2 slightly beaten eggs
1/4 cup fresh orange juice
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cups raisins
3/4 cup snipped dates
1/2 cup diced mixed fruit and peel
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. cloves
1 tsp. mace

Soak bread pieces in the milk. Stir in the suet, sugar, eggs, orange juice and vanilla. Mix together the flour, soda, salt, cinnamon, cloves and mace. Add the flour mixture to the fruit mixture. Pour into a greased pudding mold. Steam for 3 !/2 hours. Cool at least 10 minutes before unmolding. Cut pudding and serve with Hard Sauce.

HARD SAUCE
Cream together1 stick butter and 1 tsp. vanilla. Add 2 cups sifted powdered sugar and cream until fluffy. Beat in 1 egg yolk and then stir in 1 stiff, beaten egg white.