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.
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