I sure was! Suet is rendered fat, typically from cow or lamb, and it is widely available through both local butchers and grocery store meat departments — just ask!
If you prefer a vegetarian alternative, substitute in an equivalent weight of vegetable shortening. Tip: Steer clear of butter when making this recipe — its lower melting point means that it is likely to melt before the recipe has fully set, resulting in a heavier, greasier dessert. Though the traditional recipe requires that you boil the pudding in intestines, I recommend a muslin cloth as the modern alternative. As I mentioned above, traditional puddings are boiled. If you have never made one, the preparation of this recipe will feel very different to you.
Rinse it in cold water and hang it in a clean room to dry before you mix up the batter. Rub the grated suet into the dry ingredients until only pea-sized pieces or smaller remain.
Add mashed potato into the dry ingredients and mix until thoroughly combined. Then, add the raisins and currants and mix until evenly distributed. In another bowl, beat the eggs until smooth, and then stir milk into the beaten eggs. Add these wet ingredients the milk and egg mixture to the batter and mix thoroughly. Submerge your prepared cloth in the pot of boiling water. Wearing heavy rubber gloves, remove the cloth from the water and wring out any excess moisture.
Lay the cloth flat on a clean countertop and liberally sprinkle the center where you will place the batter with flour.
Rub flour across the cloth, ensuring that a circle of at least 16 inches in diameter is coated with flour, and that the flour layer is slightly thicker at the center. Place the batter on the floured cloth.
Gather the cloth up around the mixture and, tightly cinch the cloth as close to the mixture as possible using kitchen twine. Knot the corners together for a more secure seal. Lower the cloth into the boiling water and cover the pot. Boil the pudding for four hours, replenishing the water as necessary. Cut the string, open the cloth, and turn the dessert out onto a plate to cool.
December 15, The story of how a medieval stew of meat and dried fruits became a cake that people eat at Christmas. Get our freshest features and recipes weekly. Allison Robicelli Allison Robicelli is a D-list celebrity-chef chef, author, humorist, entrepreneur, general polymath, and all-around good time.
Apart from being a loaf, fruitcake is made with a butter batter that is often dense, solid, and has that peculiar texture of being dry like pound cake yet moist and crumbly when baked to perfection. By comparison, it is a swift baking process that requires very little preparation. A Christmas Pudding, on the other hand, is a suet-based cake that is steamed for hours, giving it a rich, moist and crumbly texture that makes it more fitting for a bowl than a plate.
Well beyond using a simple loaf tin, making a Christmas Pudding requires pudding basins wrapped in parchment and foil, tied with twine, and then suspended in the right amount of boiling water that needs to be nurtured and kept level for hours.
To make a Christmas Pudding, you need time, love and courage to go big and bold. If I had to compare it, it is the freshly made pastry on a summer tart, the delicate toasted meringue atop a spring lemon pie, and the handmade jam that swirls through your autumn marble Bundt cake.
The year before, I had passed by the store offerings, brightly wrapped in garishly shiny paper and later being passed out at office holiday parties like sugar cookies, only to be re-gifted at the next party, unwrapped and unloved.
Unbeknownst to me, the real love was saved for the ones their grandmothers were making. So it goes without saying that when the topic of Christmas Pudding came up, I was less than amused by the prospect of sitting in a tiny cold flat with hot cups of tea watching the water boil for eight hours — until that first plume of aromatic cloud melted my heart and converted me.
There was no steeping the pudding that year; we devoured our Christmas Pudding fresh from the pot, tossed out our tea, replacing it with brandy, and were as festive as two newlyweds could be over a round confection still steaming from the bath, all while it was fighting us to let it rest. There are many recipes for Christmas Pudding, all with slight variations depending on the family. Traditionally, the Sunday before Advent is a day dedicated to the holiday kitchen, and more specifically, Christmas Pudding.
This is not a day for multitasking, it is day when you take your kitchen by two hands and hold it close, just as you do when you remove your steaming hot and surprisingly dense pudding, which has been made all the more heavy by the steaming process that brings it all together.
Being tied to the kitchen sparks the holiday season and fills the house with scents of mixed spices, nutmeg, cinnamon and candied peel, making it unlike any other festive treat.
The lingering aromas of citrus and spice only intensify as the pudding steeps, and then reaches its peak when the pudding is steamed. Each pudding serves Blend the fruits, citron, peel, spices and suet and place in a bowl or jar. Soak the bread crumbs in milk and sherry or port. Combine the well-beaten eggs and sugar. Blend with the fruit mixture. Add salt and mix thoroughly.
Cover with foil and tie it firmly. Steam for hours. Add a dash of cognac to each pudding, cover with foil and keep in a cool place. To use, steam again for hours and unmold. Sprinkle with sugar; add heated cognac. Ignite and bring to the table. Serve with hard sauce or cognac sauce.
How would you rate Superb English Plum Pudding? Leave a Review. Is the citron fresh or candied? Further, a covered mold with a snap on metal lid, a bowl covered with a cloth tied under the rim, covered with tin foil under the rim, covered with a small plate then tin foil, etc? All very different methods in regards to what the mixture is actually exposed to. I'm still researching this and trying 3 different methods this year and will post later about the results.
Whatever the technique, the key is low and slow to avoid a dense "close" texture. I am making this for a dinner next month and I've read all the reviews and comments. But could someone give me more specifics about the "steaming" process? Should have read fruit will react with the FOIL! Good recipe. I guess most folks know not to store this pudding with foil as the cover.
Use anything but foil. If you do, the fruit in the pudding will almost certainly react when in contact with the fruit, and the pudding may develop mould. I've used a plate, inverted over the basin and then wrapped it all in cling wrap. If you aren't storing it for long you can skip the plate and just use the cling film.
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