The Christmas Pudding

Last year, around this time, wrote about making the Christmas cake. So this year, I’m going to write about the pudding.  I just made it, and it’s safely stored ready to be set on fire with copious quantities of rum on Christmas day.

The pudding recipe, like the cake recipe, is handed down from my mother’s mother’s mother, my great granny Nock. She died before my mother was born, and my mother was named Mary for her. I only do one quarter of the quantities given in the recipe, and that fills a pudding basin, making a pudding  big enough for fourteen people, with a little left over. So presumably my great grandmother was making four puddings of that size, which is quite a thought.

The pudding is easier to make than the cake, because there’s no creaming butter and sugar. In fact there’s very little sugar in it, but loads of currants and raisins (there are no raisins in the cake). There are lots of almonds, not cut too small, mixed peel, and spices. There’s some flour and breadcrumbs, with suet and eggs. I use vegetable suet nowadays, not beef suet, although I’m actually not sure whether vegetable suet involves less saturated fat, and I don’t want to investigate in case it turns out as I suspect, to be just as bad for you.

 I know very little about my great grandfather Nock, but I do know that he suffered from gout, and died aged fifty ish. The pudding recipe may explain this. It is, and I’m not boasting, because it’s nothing to do with me, I just follow the recipe, the best pudding ever. He wouldn’t have been able to refuse it, even with four on offer over the Christmas holidays.

The other things I know about my great grandfather, oddly enough, made me lose interest in researching the family. His name was Benjamin, and his father, a furnaceman in the steel works, died when he was a few months old. His mother remarried very promptly and had a number of other children. So what I wanted to know was, how did he feel being the odd child out? How did his step father treat him? How did Benjamin, after going to work in the steel works at twelve, end up owning and running a large (for the time) hotel? He must have been well off – I have my great grandmother’s very nice three stone diamond engagement ring, and my grandmother had singing lessons and painting lessons.  The really interesting questions about him are the ones you can’t answer by researching family history.

At any rate, the pudding must be steamed for at least eight hours, then put away until Christmas day. Really it should be steamed again on the day, but I’m afraid to say I usually microwave it warm, because I start to run out of pans and gas rings.  Then it’s served with rum sauce, not (emphatically not!) brandy butter. Really, it’s practically a meal in itself, and not the ideal follow on to Christmas dinner, but we have to stick with tradition. And no one says no!