Plum pudding, a tutorial.

{The recipe and instructions for flaming your plum pudding are at the end of this post.}

Our family is so Thanksgiving-pie-oriented that by the time Christmas rolls around, we really are ready to have a dessert that is not pie.

But, in the early days when we were settling our traditions for the holidays, I wanted something fabulous, of course. However, cake was out as well, as all the December birthdays we are blessed with have created a surfeit.


A Continual Feast to the rescue! Early on in our married life I got myself this book (only in hardcover, which I wish were still available):











If you want to incorporate food in a traditional way into your celebration of the liturgical year, this is a great resource, and it has that helpful air of letting you in on actual traditions, rather than retro-fitted made-up ones, that I appreciate. It makes a lovely wedding or shower gift! Or hey, Christmas present!

I pored over it, and at some point decided that plum pudding represented the dessert that would most bring out the Dickensian aspect of Christmas that a literary person such as myself finds indispensable, as well as release me from any last-minute exigencies.

Because not only are we not in the mood for pie (although I have made my share of mincemeat), or cake, we are -- I am -- in no shape for much cooking on or even near this glorious feast.





Why not feature a meal-ender that

1) is so laden with emotional, as well as gustatory, freight that it lives up to the challenge and

2) can be set on fire, allowing you to over-awe your little ones with the explanation that for their birthdays you light candles, but for Jesus' birthday you light the whole cake. Trust me, they will be beside themselves to the point that it will matter not one whit that many of them actually do not prefer the taste of this treat.

Which leads me to the next virtue of plum pudding: One recipe will make at least two cakes, and it will keep for at least a year. So if you heed well my injunction to make dessert first, you simply can't go wrong with being able to make dessert a whole year or more in advance.

Another excellent feature of plum pudding is that it requires no expertise whatsoever to produce. You don't need to know any particular techniques of cake-making to furnish your eaters with a tasty (some say, others don't) treat.

You don't even need any exact recipe, and in fact I have blended the features of several recipes together in the course of my years of browsing and perusing and attempting various types. It was hard to resist Gourmet Magazine's "Royal Family Plum Pudding," for instance, even while remaining true to the Vitz version, as being the first one I had followed. But as I experimented, I realized that it was not going to be possible to go wrong, as long as you have enough suet, sugar, and rich fruits. It's all good.

You do need to buy certain things that you may not have on hand (consult the actual recipe at the end for the ingredients; here I will point out the more arcane ones):

A pot big enough to steam two quart-sized dishes, with two racks that will fit inside (see photos for a hack)
Suet (tutorial-within-a-tutorial below)
Nice dried fruits, but no particular kinds

Everything else you will have on hand, and you may already have everything but the suet, I'd guess. You can probably do this today or tomorrow!

I have learned over the years that it's helpful to separate the recipe into three conceptual building blocks.

1. The fruit --dried and candied -- which will need to steep in alcohol for at least an hour

2. The dry ingredients and spices -- which include a cup of fresh breadcrumbs, which might take you another step to prepare if you don't have a stash in the freezer

3. The wet ingredients -- which include the suet

Fruits:

Usually I focus on prunes, with raisins and even figs thrown in. But at this moment it happened that we had a lovely super-ripe pineapple, and I decided to make this year's (and, perforce, next year's) plum pudding "Jamaica-style," which is perfectly historical and acceptable.

And as my local store neither had candied fruits of the usual kind, nor do I really want them even if they are available, because they are, honestly, tasteless, pineapple it was.

I also never really succeed when I follow others' directions on candying one's own fruit, so I just did it my own way. Viz:

Put your fruit (in this case, about two cups chunked pineapple, core and skin removed, obviously) in a pan with some nice thick orange and lemon rind. I use that little tool up there on the right to get my peels. It works fine.

Pour over it about a cup of sugar syrup. {Sugar syrup is made thus (I truly did just have some on hand, from the bee-feeding days of the fall): 2 parts sugar, one part water, brought to the boil, simmered for about 10 minutes.}

Simmer the fruit for about 5 minutes and then remove it to a bowl. Boil down the syrup, pour in any collected juices from the bowl, boil down some more, and when you have something that is thick and sweet in your pan, pour it over your fruit. Do not stress over this (or any) part, but also do not stray far from the stove or you will have burnt sugar in your pan! You can skip all this if you have located nice candied fruit. Maybe Trader Joe's has some?

The dry ingredients:

Just follow the recipe - no particular tricks from me.

This time I used dark brown sugar because that was what was open in my cupboard. Another time I might use light. For some reason I'm out of cloves; I used allspice instead.

Mix them all together in a bowl.

You can do all this while homeschooling, she said, airily, with one studious teenager to watch over. But I have been doing this for years and years! Including pregnant! And nursing! You can do it!


Wet ingredients:

Suet: If you are not used to working with suet, or know what to look for, I herewith provide the following information; and I would like to alert you that some markets do pass off as suet something that is just... fat.

But suet is more than fat. It's the pure "leaf" fat that surrounds the kidneys, and it has a light, delicate, sweet taste that will not make you feel like someone put a steak in your after-dinner treat.

You can tell by looking at it:

Go ahead and buy a bunch, even though you don't need a lot in your recipe, because the birds love suet, and they need a Christmas treat too!

Here it looks almost like there are some really gross guts on this super decayed suet feeder, but actually that's apple peelings on top of pieces of suet. Put the rest in the freezer -- you can put it out already frozen.

Below, I've pulled this hunk-o-suet apart so that you can see (and can you almost hear?) how it separates into these chunks, netted with a very thin membrane.

No rinds, no veins, no gristle... if what you see in the store doesn't have this white, rounded appearance, it's not really suet.




Now, suppose you bought almost 2 lbs, like I did, and you want 1/3 lb.

Well, cut your chunk in half. Now you have 2 just-about-1-lb pieces.

Yes, we are eye-balling it. It's fine, because you can pretty much be accurate this way, and anyway, it seriously does not matter.

Now divide one of those halves into three more or less equal pieces. Voila! 1/3 lb.





Remove any larger membranes by pulling gently. The fat will fall away in nice chunky pieces.





See how smooth and lovely it is? You could also render (gently boil) your other pieces and fry things up in it. I remember -- I am old enough to remember -- French fries from McDonald's that had been fried in suet. Oh my, they were so good that today's fries taste to me like cardboard.




Process until finely grained. To prove to you that we have 1/3 lb here, I weighed it on my scale.

A pound is 16 ounces. One third of that is a little more than 5 ounces.








I promise I didn't cheat!

{Why not use butter, you ask? You could. Or in this Jamaica-style pudding, even coconut oil. The latter would be very stable. The former might -- might -- become rancid over time, although I doubt it, what with soaking it in all that booze. I have used butter. But suet is nice, it really is!}





Now mix together your suet, eggs, and chopped apple. Since I spaced out and did four, not two, eggs, I didn't use the other liquids (the recipe calls for beer, ale, stout, or milk -- sometimes I use cider if I have some funky dregs lying around). I figured I could add it in at the end if things didn't seem moist enough to me, but what with the liquid from the fruits, I suspected I'd be good, and I was right.

So now you have your three basic elements ready. You need baking vessels. In the past I have used the traditional tin charlotte mold, like this one:

but it's really too big, with another pan, if you are making two.

I like using these serving bowls. The one in the back has a narrow base, which comes in handy for the rack arrangement in the pot -- you'll see.

Generously butter and flour the dishes, and put a round of wax paper in the bottom as well, buttering it too. There is no point, people, in skimping on this step. Do you want to be miserable or do you want to be happy? Okay.

Start mixing your ingredients in a larger bowl. No skill required.

Notice that the suet does give a lumpy texture. That's dandy.

Using two layers of foil, cover the dishes tightly -- tightly or steam will get in there and make everything soggy! -- and fasten with a rubber band. Go ahead and use two rubber bands. The other thing that makes these dishes good is that they have a lip to hold the rubber band in place. Look around and see if you have something like that.

Get your big 15- or 20-quart pot, and put something in the bottom to hold the first dish over the water. (If you are making one pudding, you can use an 8-10 quart pot, but be aware that you will have a lot of plum pudding left over.)

If I had two round cake racks, I would use them, but I only have one, and I need it to separate the dishes. So I use this iron trivet. You could use tin tuna cans with the tops and bottoms cut out (you'd need three and they'd need to be very clean or your cake will have a tinge of the sea), or possibly cookie cutters? Not plastic ones!

I put this rack on top of the first dish with the little legs sticking up, so they wouldn't poke through the foil. Now the narrow base of the one dish comes in handy, as it nestles in there, between the legs, really well.

You should have a good amount of water in the pot -- up to the base of the first dish. And have a kettle with hot water nearby in case the water boils down. Pop the lid on and set her to boiling! Have the heat at a good steady level -- you want steam but not crazy clouds of steam in your kitchen!

Here's what it looks like when you are done! If you had used lighter sugar, it would be lighter. Don't worry! It will be tasty! (Well, so say some. But everyone has to have a bite! Eventually they learn to love it! It's tradition!)

Put one in a tin and one in a plastic container. Pour more of whatever alcohol -- brandy, rum, orange liqueur, sherry -- you've used all over it, and put wax paper on top before you stick the lid on. The one in plastic you can put in the back of your extra fridge or in the freezer -- it will keep for a really, really long time. Two years is my personal max.

The other one you want handy for this Christmas.

And here is last year's serving (which was really plum Plum Pudding, non-island-style). Doesn't it look good?

These last and first photos of the pudding being served are from Rosie!

Flaming Plum Pudding, Like Mother Like Daughter.


It is good to start this process in the first week of Advent. But now is fine.

Have ready one charlotte mold or two quart-sized oven-proof serving dishes, depending on whether you want one large or two smaller puddings. Know that a smaller one will easily serve 12 people, as each person will only want a spoonful, if that, because it is so rich and dense.
Also, a big pot and two racks; tin foil; two, or better, four, rubber bands.


Cover with 1/4 cup brandy, rum, or cider:
1 cup mixed dried fruits such as golden and or dark raisins, currants, chopped prunes, chopped figs
or
1 cup of candied fresh pineapple (see procedure above) and 1/3 cup golden raisins
1/4 cup candied orange and/or lemon peel, or add the grated rind of those fruits to the pineapple

Set aside to macerate for about an hour. A day -- while you go buy the suet, for instance -- is even better.

Mix dry ingredients: 
1/2 cup fine breadcrumbs, fresh or dry (if you use the processor to make your crumbs, don't wash it out -- later you can chop your apples and suet in the same bowl)
3/4 cup light or dark brown sugar
1/3 cup flour
1/2 tsp. each: cinnamon, ginger, cloves or allspice
pinch of nutmeg
1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 cup finely chopped almonds or other nuts

Mix wet ingredients:
2 eggs (the original recipe calls for 4; this year I used 4; often I use 2 -- I can't adequately convey how little it matters)
1/3 lb. beef suet, finely chopped
1/3 cup peeled and cored apple, chopped

When your one or two dishes are ready -- buttered, waxed, and floured as described above -- mix all the ingredients together well.

If things seem dry, and this depends on your fruit, add:
up to 3/4 cup stout, ale, beer, milk, or cider

{If you knew you were doing dry fruit, you could put your beer over your breadcrumbs separately from the dry ingredients, and then add that to the wet ingredients. The difference would be slight, but soaked fresh breadcrumbs do add a silky texture.}


In the end, you want the whole thing to be like a loose-ish quick bread batter.

Pour into your dishes and place your dishes, stacked onto each other with a rack in between and tightly covered with foil, over water. Bring to a boil, with the cover of the pot tightly fitted, for 2 hours (for the two dishes) or 3 hours (for the one pudding). When the pudding is close to being done, it will smell like Christmas at your house, and the center will be puffed. You can pull out the dish and open the foil covering -- be careful when you open the pot, because steam burns!
Put the dish on the counter and use a knife to test the center. It should slide out clean. If the pudding is still sticky in the center, cover it up tightly again and replace it. You can add hot water to the pot as you go.

Pack up the cooled pudding as suggested above, using plenty of booze. When you serve it, re-heat it in the same dish by warming it in the oven or in another steambath -- or in the microwave. Only -- try to just heat it through so that your alcohol doesn't burn off.

To light your pudding on fire:

Take a 1/4 cup of brandy or rum and warm it gently. I use the small pitcher I am going to bring to the table. It needs to be quite hot to the touch but not boiling, or the alcohol will boil off and nothing will light!

Put your warm pudding on a warmed serving dish that has sides -- no flat cake plates or the flaming liquid will spill right off onto your tablecloth, and you will have ruined Christmas all by yourself.

Bring the serving dish and your warmed pitcher of alcohol into your serving area -- and make sure the lights have been turned off! Just like at a birthday party.

Now, strike a match into your pitcher, or have someone strike it as you tip the contents, getting ready to pour. In the dark, you will see the very blue flame of the lit liquid -- only, it's hard to see! Look carefully!

Now, pour the liquid slowly over the pudding, letting it soak in. Try not to panic, as you will then send flaming spatters all over. As you begin to pour, hopefully the warmed (but uncooked) alcohol in the pudding will also catch flame, and you will have several minutes of a beautiful show for your family and guests. Let them really ooh and aah! (If things don't alight at first, warm them a little more and try again. It's almost certainly that things weren't warm enough that is the problem.)