Plum Pudding and Plum Cake

Believe it or not, it wasn't until a few years ago that I had my first "plum pudding." It was during the Christmas season and one of the stores had it advertised. I'd long heard of plum pudding, but I really didn't even know what it was. It came in a small tin canister, as I recall. I tried it and I liked it. It is in the same sort of category as fruit cake, as it contains pieces of dried fruit in a spiced dark cake like mixture, laced with rum or brandy. A little research revealed there are no plums in plum pudding, the term for the dessert being taken from the fact that up until about two hundred years ago, raisins were referred to as "plums" in England, and plum pudding has lots of raisins. It eventually came to be associated with Christmas in England and some people made the pudding about a year in advance, allowing the product to age for a year, before serving it. Plum pudding made the journey across the Atlantic with English colonists, whose descendants became Americans, and I suppose it may still traditionally grace the Christmas menu in parts of New England, or a few rural areas, where such traditions have lingered. The term "pudding" will also throw most Americans off, too, as in England, puddings can mean a dish of meat and other ingredients boiled or steamed until solidified into a loaf or sausage, or a pudding can be a pastry or a sweetened dessert like rice pudding. To non American readers, most Americans certainly think of pudding as a milk-based kind of custard, or cornstarch thickened flavored milk dessert.

Initially I was going to include a recipe here, but there are many and you can find a multitude of such online or in cookbooks. The general idea is, raisins, dried fruit peel, and spices like nutmeg, ground cloves, and cinnamon are combined and soaked in rum or brandy for a few days. These are then mixed with flour, bread pieces or bread crumbs, eggs, sugar, and more rum or brandy. The dough can then be wrapped in cloth and steamed or boiled, or put into a bowl and steamed.

Plum cake (what Americans might call a plum tart) is something I became attached to in Germany, where bake shops frequently had them displayed in their windows. There are many regional terms for this dessert in German, with "Pflaumenkuchen" (literally "plum cake") being more common in the north and a wide variety of forms like Zwetschgendatschi/Zwetschkendatschi" (in Bavaria and Austria), "Quetschekuchen" (Hessen and part of the Rhineland) or "Zwetschgenkuchen" used elsewhere. It is my understanding that it is also made in the German part of Switzerland, but I'm not sure of the name they use for it there. A plum tart has a flat, usually yeast-risen, somewhat sweetened dough rolled out like a pizza crust for a baking sheet. The pitted, but unpeeled plums are fitted onto the dough in overlapping fashion, like roofing tiles. Sugar and cinnamon are sprinkled over the top, or in some regions, it is more of a streusel like topping. I loved the "Quetschekuche" of Frankfurt, along with a cup of coffee.         

WORD HISTORY:
Plum/Prune-These are really the same word, but in slightly altered forms. The ultimate origins are uncertain, although many believe the term to come from an ancient language in the area of what is now Turkey, but well before the Turks settled there, and people in that area in ancient times were often Indo Europeans. Anyway, Greek had "proumnon" which then became "prounon," which meant "plum." Latin borrowed the word from Greek as "prunum," which then became "pruna." Old Germanic borrowed the word from Latin, but with many of the Germanic dialects changing the "r" to "l;" thus Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had "plume" (likely pronounced as "ploom-eh," before the "u" sound changed to a short sound, and the ending "e" was dropped). The Latin form "pruna" was inherited by Old French, a Latin-based language, as "prune." English borrowed the word circa 1400; thus English has "plum" for the fresh fruit and "prune" for the dried, wrinkled, shiny fruit. Forms in the other Germanic languages: standard German has "Pflaume"^ (plum) and both "Backpflaume" and "Dörrpflaume" (dried plum/prune); Low German Saxon has "Pluum" (plum) and "Backpluum" (prune); Dutch has "pruim" (plum) and "pruimen" (prune); West Frisian has "prom" (plum); Danish has "blomme" (plum; notice the "b" in place of "p"); Norwegian has "plomme" (plum) and Swedish has "plommon" (plum) and Icelandic has "plóma."

^ Standard German is based upon a form of High German. One of the characteristics of High German long ago was the "frequent" change in sound of "p" to "pf" and sometimes to "f." Thus while English has "pipe," German has "Pfeife," where the first "p" changed to "pf" and the second "p" changed to "f." The Low German dialects and Frisian were not affected by this sound change, nor was English, as the Anglo-Saxons had already departed the mainland for Britain by the time many of the changes which brought about High German had taken place.