Ingredients for Grandma’s Wartime Christmas Pudding:
- 8 oz raisins
- 8 oz sultanas
- 8 oz currants
- 4 oz candied peel
- 8 oz breadcrumbs
- 8 oz plain flour
- 8 oz suet
- 1 large apple grated
- 1 carrot grated
- 8 oz brown sugar
- ½ tps Nutmeg
- ½ tps Mixed Spice
- Rind and Juice Lemon
- Sherry, milk and 2 eggs
Method for Grandma’s Wartime Christmas Pudding:
- Mix all ingredients together. Cover with greaseproof paper and an old tea towel tied with string both around and across the basin so that it can easily be moved from the saucepan.
- Heat a pan of hot water to boiling point and place the pudding inside. Boil again then simmer. Keep topping up with hot water. Steam for six hours.
- Leave to cool. (Keep stored in a cool dry place. This can be heated through on Christmas Day in a microwave).
By 1942 this would have been a very luxurious pudding and the ingredients would have taken months to save up. Raisins, sultanas and currants were often not available, lemons very rarely in the shop. Suet being a fat was on ration as was sugar, of course.
Eggs were not easy to find unless you kept your own poultry although dried eggs were sent from the USA which would be substituted in baking. The spices were probably those left in the cupboard in 1939 – not a priority item when the shipping space was needed for so many other things.
Steaming is traditional but you can cook many steamed puddings in just minutes in the microwave. We owe microwaves to WW2 as well – the magnetron that makes the microwaves was developed by British scientists to improve radar accuracy.
how much milk and sherry are used in this recipe as it does not say thanks
@amanda: Just as much liquid as you need to make the mix pliable but not sticky. Heavier on the sherry than the milk.
In the Dorset Echo they have a 1943 recipe for Christmas pudding which mentions 2 dripped eggs? What does that mean?