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If ever you've - lazily, guiltily - bought ready-peeled,… Read on
This is not quite a stir-fry, though I do cook it in my wok.… Read on
I don’t deny it: there is something unattractively boastful about calling one’s own recipe “ultimate”. But having soaked my dried fruit for this pudding in Pedro Ximénez – the sweet, dark, sticky sherry that has a hint of liquorice, fig and treacle about it – I know there is no turning back. It’s not even as if it’s an extravagance: the rum or brandy I’ve used up till now are more expensive and do the trick less well. This is sensational. I love the same fruits, too, steeped in the magic liqueur, but this here is the Queen of Christmas puddings. It has to be tried, and clamours to be savoured.I know that many of you, tradition be damned, are resistant to Christmas pudding, and I do understand why. But you must try this. For until you do, you probably think all that dried fruit is, well, dry, and the pudding heavy. Yet this is far from the case: the fruit is moist and sticky, and the pudding mystifyingly, meltingly light. A note on Christmas pudding generally, though I admit it’s not my first foray into this; traditions, even if not followed to the letter, can’t be wholly dispensed with just because they have lost their novelty – that is precisely their point. So, faithful readers, please forgive my ageing-lecturer style repetitiveness here. Traditionally, you should have all the family in the kitchen as you make your pudding, each one giving a stir in turn, the youngest first and going upwards in age. To honour the three kings, you are meant to stir from east to west, but I don’t have a compass and am not good enough at geography to work that one out. Stir-up Sunday, when we are supposed to make our puddings, falls near the end of November, on the Sunday before Advent, and is – as I’ve told some of you before – a religious rather than a culinary injunction, as in “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people”. But personally I have never managed to make my puddings quite so efficiently in advance.Some cooks like to use only 13 ingredients, symbolizing Jesus and his apostles, but a little bit of superstition enters in as well, since charms were traditionally included in the mix: a thimble, to suggest that whoever found it in their portion would stay a spinster, a coin to indicate riches, a ring to signify a wedding on the horizon, and so on. These days you’d be hard put to find such charms, though I own some pretty ancient ones. Clearly, we’re just interested in money, as now it’s coins that most of us bury in the pudding. (And some advice here: do clean them first; the best, if alarming way, is to soak them overnight in sugary cola. The Health & Safety recommendation is to wrap the coins in greaseproof paper even if they have been cleaned, but I unapologetically disobey. You must make up your own mind.)There is still more than a whiff of the pagan about the pud: not only is each person meant to make a wish – superstition superseding faith – as they stir the mixture in advance; but the flaming of the pudding, as you serve it, is a nod to the pagan winter solstice celebration, in which fire and light and warmth are brought into our chill darkness. And to reiterate the little English history lesson I gave in Feast, actually, the Christmas pudding was once seen as a religious affront. Oliver Cromwell banned it as a “lewd custom”, dismissing the rich pudding as “unfit for God fearing people”, and the Quakers magnificently condemned it as “the invention of the scarlet whore of Babylon”. I used to fear that the Quakers made Christmas pudding sound more exciting than it is, so I’ve long done my bit to come up with a pudding that the scarlet whore of Babylon would be truly proud of. I don’t recant any earlier recipes, but this one, definitively, is it.
Recipe posted by NigellaMAKE AHEAD TIP:
Make the Christmas pudding up to 6 weeks ahead. Keep in a cool, dark place, then proceed as recipe on Christmas Day.
FREEZE AHEAD TIP:
Make and freeze the Christmas pudding for up to 1 year ahead. Thaw overnight at room temperature and proceed as recipe on Christmas Day.
I made this for the first time last Christmas and it was absolutely delicious. I'm planning on making it today as it is Stir Up Sunday but I'm wondering how it will work if I use shortening instead of suet. We've drastically cut down our meat consumption and are only buying meat from ethical sources (no factory farms). That said I can't find suet so I'll be using Earth Balancing shortening. If anyone has tried it I'd love to hear the results ~ I'm a bit nervous to mess with perfection.
Posted by Sunflowerrae on 27th Nov 2011 at 19.30
A tip for no-hassle cooking for this, which I have done for the last three years. Stick the mixture in the pudding bowl, covered up, into the slow cooker on Christmas Eve morning, fill with water to just under the top of the pudding bowl and turn on low. Perfect result. I also up the sugar by 50g as I found it wasn't sweet enough for my liking, oh and lobbed a bit more fruit to be seeped including a few chopped up figs. I will never buy a shop Christmas pudding again!
Posted by Rammy Stuey on 1st Jan 2012 at 10.48