PipeTobacco asked about Christmas pudding so here's everything you need to know!
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| A pudding I made a few years ago. |
Christmas pudding is a very rich, fruity steamed pudding, traditionally made on Stir Up Sunday, in late November, on the last Sunday before Advent. The tradition was that everyone in the household would have a stir and make a wish. Dried fruits, suet, treacle, brandy, are all pretty much essential ingredients and many people use recipes handed down through generations.
To cook it is steamed for several hours, then stored, and reheated on Christmas morning, by steaming again. It is carried to the table in flames, having had a ladleful of flaming brandy poured over it and is served traditionally with brandy butter but Husband likes his with thick clotted cream or plenty of custard.
It is an acquired taste. I don't like it but our Italian in-laws tried and seemed to enjoy it. As I said, it's very rich: a little goes a long way!
By the way I made mine in pudding bowls but some people like to make round puddings, wrapped in muslin.
And here's what Charles Dickens wrote about it in A Christmas Carol:
“Mrs Cratchit left the room alone – too nervous to bear witnesses – to take the pudding up and bring it in… Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper which smells like a washing-day. That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that. That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered – flushed, but smiling proudly – with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quarter of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.”
8 comments:
I love Christmas pudding but I don't get it very often anymore. My Mom always made a little one for Christmas and served it with a kind of caramel sauce. No brandy flames for us -- she was too scared of burning the house down. For me, Christmas pudding is a fond holiday memory of years gone by.
No Christmas pud this year... come to that, no Christmas lunch, either. But we've all survived so far and there's a successful vaccine in the offing. That'll do!
Mother hid old silver sixpences (wrapped in baking paper) inside the pudding.
So eat carefully! Whoever found a sixpence got given a shilling; the silver coins were washed and collected for reuse next Xmas.
PipeTobacco will need to use his local currency.
I bought one for Husband this year. I thought I'd ordered a small one but it seems rather large. I could post you some, Debra!
No turkey for us, either, Sonata, and the way the decorating's going no table it to eat it from anyway!
I don't think my gran wrapped her sixpences, Stu. They went in as they were.
I make our Christmas puds every year, always intending to get them done by the end of October but it usually ends up being later in November and on the odd occasion even in December LOL Some years I make more than others, depending on who's twisted my arm to make them one, but there's always one for our daughter, one for my sister and two for us as we have a family tradition of one at Easter, too :)
I've not been privileged to try your type of pudding, Liz. It's hard for me to imagine. I think of it as somewhat akin to our brandied fruit cake. Nothing could be bad when basted with brandy.
For years I served "Snowflake Pudding" (mostly whipped cream incorporating much shredded coconut - with raspberry sauce) for festive occasions; but, about 30-40 years ago I switched back to an old family recipe for date pudding, American style (a brown sugar syrup with dates (rather like pie filling) with floating islands of sweet bread/sliced pecans - baked until the pudding is thick and the islands browned. Our family members actually prefer pecan or (usually and) chocolate chiffon pies.
I have read about Christmas Pudding many, many times and have always thought it to be a bit like fruit cake - another acquired taste.
Your the besst
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