I like to tell this story every year, partly because I think it’s fairly personal to me, but it also has some interesting bits of british culture and history that I can talk about too.
So, what is Christmas pudding? – well it’s something quite specific. It’s a steamed pudding, made of dried fruit and nuts AND quite a lot of alcohol. Steamed puddings used to be fairly common in the uk. Basically you put the ingredients together and then you cook it in boiling water for hours and the flavours merge together and the mixture solidifies. The puddings are very stodgy and high in calories, but would have been perfect in the days when we used to work in the fields at manual jobs. Christmas pudding is interesting because it is particularly rich, and so in the old days it would have been something very indulgent for poor families at Christmas. Ok, so I’ve no idea if any of this is true, but I haven’t wikipedia’d any of this, because this is my personal understanding that I love.
Why is it special to me? Well the recipe I use has been passed down a couple of generations. My mother got it from her mother, so it does feel like to make a Christmas pudding each year is keeping up some kind of tradition of the olden days. The recipe gets edited a bit each year – for example it calls for suet, which is some kind of horrific meat fat, so I used butter instead. But by and large the recipe remains the same.
It’s not super difficult to make, it’s just a lot of ingredients. The dry ingredients go in first, and it’s really important for flavour that they are fully mixed, so tradition has it that each member of the family gives the mixture a little stir and makes a wish. And this is not the only thing, just before it’s served, it’s traditional to put small coins in the christmas pudding so that people eating it get a lucky Christmas gift.
To make the pudding particularly flvourful, it is made weeks in advance of christmas to allow the alchol to fully mix with the fruit. In fact the church seems to have a designated ‘Stir Up Sunday’, at the end of November, when you are supposed to make the christmas pudding.
And the final strange thing is the way it is served. A spoonful of hot brandy is cooked of a candle, so that it starts to flame, and then this flame is poured on top of the pudding (and we take a photo on our iphones). This adds extra alcohol to an already alcoholic pudding. It is eaten with cream, or brandy butter or even custard. Nom nom nom.