Say It With Suet

I steamed our Christmas pudding on Tuesday, which meant that all afternoon I was listening to the happy hissing of my biggest pot. I tweeted about it: "Nothing says 'Welcome, Jesus!' like suet."

Christmas pudding is a little weird. The grocery store checkout girl asked me about the suet and I tried to explain: dried fruit! more dried fruit! suet! hours of steaming! stash it in a closet and feed it with brandy! then set it on fire!

I don't think she's going to race home and make one herself. We're not so keen on the dried fruit desserts here in the US of A, where fruitcake is more of a joke than a treat. Still, ever since we moved back from the UK I make some sort of dessert based on dried fruit for our Christmas table. Sometimes it's little mince tartlets; sometimes it's a British Christmas cake. This year it's Christmas pudding.

In Britain you just couldn't have a Christmas dinner without one of those things. It'd be like inviting people over for Thanksgiving and serving them raw okra with canned water chestnuts. My great-great-greats mostly came from the British Isles, and that's part of what caught my fancy about these desserts: the near certainty that my way-back g'g'g'g'g'great-grandmothers stirred up something very similar in their own kitchens, all those generations ago.

Michael Pollan writes in The Botany of Desire about how the availability of white sugar has changed our perception of sweetness. Imagine a world in which the only concentrated sweetener was one you had to negotiate with hacked-off bees to obtain. Imagine, too, a world in which Chilean raspberries stayed in Chile and there were no aisles full of frozen food: if you wanted a December dessert, you had to plan ahead. It's a luxury for us to be able to say, "Oh, I hate raisins." (I used to complain vociferously about raisins.) Christmas pudding reminds me to appreciate sweetness wherever I find it.

It is not by any means a penitential dessert, though. I soaked dried fruit and candied peel overnight in brandy, to plump them up and enhance their flavor. I mixed up just enough of a batter to hold the drained fruit together, and stirred in grated apple and grated suet. (More about suet here, and a little more here. I might be the Midwest's leading suet blogger, you think? Everybody needs a niche.)

I asked my 11yo which kind of dessert I should make this year and he said, "Pudding. Definitely pudding. Isn't that the one we set on fire?" (That's one of my favorite memories of Christmas 2002, his puzzled little 3yo voice saying, "Why we are setting the dessert on fire?") I'm not much for kitchen theatrics but it's awfully fun to bring a flaming pudding to the table in a dark room. I think, too, of all those generations before electricity, when Christmas dinners must have been dimly lit affairs -- punctuated by those flames.

At Christmas we celebrate the Light of the world bursting forth; we honor the Word who is sweeter than honey to our lips. We've learned how to make both artificial light and artificial sweetness. Christmas pudding is a reminder for me -- a delicious reminder! -- of how long people have been hungry for the real thing.

Comments

[Debs]

Hurrah for Christmas Pudding!

This is one thing I've not been brave enough to make by myself yet (as a married lady with my own household rather than helping my mum with hers), but one day I will. I know my mum made hers yesterday and I'll be looking forward to it.

[el-e-e]

Made with love and genealogy like that, as opposed to mechanically wrapped and put into a tin, fruitcake doesn't sound half bad!

We light Cherries Jubilee on fire every Christmas. I like your imagery. I'm going to have to use that. :)

[Salome Ellen]

The one staple of my childhood Christmases was "English Christmas Cookies" -- essentially dried fruit (dark and light raisins, currants, citron, and 'fruitcake mix') held together by a bare minimum of brown-sugar batter. But no booze; we were a T-total family. That part I'm glad to have outgrown!

[Celeste]

I like those really boozy fruitcakes, with a hot drink. Mmmmm.

I've never had Christmas pudding. And, I just finished reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma", so what a timely post.

[cagey]

Mmmmmm, I love, love LOVE fruitcake. The lowly, poor fruitcake. Can't get no respect Stateside.

[Kristin]

Wonderfully written, and as always, something to think about.

(And I'm feeling a little guilty for all those time I razzed my Dad for being the only person I knew who actually enjoys fruitcake...but I'll be OK...carry on.) ;-)

[Jenni]

I think this is my favorite blog post of yours so far. Awesome. Suet. Love it.

[JaneC]

Ack, you and Fr. Z and your Christmas puddings! I love, love, love Christmas pudding...and no one else in my family will eat it. What to do? It's an awful lot of work for something only I would eat, so I haven't made it since I married, and enviously eye other people's Christmas pudding blog posts.