Stir-up Sunday, the Sunday previous to advent, was the traditional day for making the Christmas pudding, with everyone in the family lending a hand and stirring the gloopy mixture while making a wish and secreting coins, rings and charms in the pud. The pudding was mixed well in advance of Christmas to allow the flavours to develop.
Christmas pudding originally developed from a meat soup thickened with breadcrumbs and egg, flavoured with spices and dried fruit and coloured bright red.
As time went on, prunes were added and it became known as Plumb Pottage, and with the addition of extra dried fruits and sugar it became a porridge, and changed its name to Plum or Christmas Porridge.
In the 19th century, the meat was lost, suet was added, and gradually alcohol was introduced. Charles Dickens immortalised it as the essence of the Christmas meal, and the pudding as we basically know it today has never looked back.
Whether or not it is the most suitable dish to conclude the blow-out feast is rarely asked, and the habit of serving it with brandy butter has always seemed to me to add to its incongruity.
But, if we do want a plum pudding to complete the meal, I think the answer is to leave out the suet and to serve it with creme fraiche, as we see in this celebrated recipe from Frances Bisell.
Christmas Pudding
Serves eight to 10, fills a 1.75-litre (3-pint) pudding basin)
230 g (8 oz, four loosely packed cups) fresh wholemeal breadcrumbs
230 g (8 oz, two cups) each of roughly chopped muscatel (black) raisins, sultanas (yellow raisins) and dried apricots
60 g (2 oz, three-quarters cup) chopped almonds
60 g (2 oz, half cup) ground or flaked almonds One grated apple
1 tablespoon grated orange zest
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground mace
Half teaspoon ground cardamom
Half teaspoon ground cloves
Half teaspoon ground allspice Two tablespoons orange marmalade or candied orange peel
Juice of one orange Four medium free-range eggs Six tablespoons or one miniature bottle of Cognac
140 ml (5 fl oz, scant two-thirds cup) fortified muscat wine, port, Marsala or rich oloroso sherry
Put all the dry ingredients in a large bowl and mix thoroughly. Put the marmalade, orange juice, eggs, brandy and wine in another large bowl, or in the blender or food processor, and beat until well blended and frothy. Pour the liquid over the dry ingredients. Mix until moist. Cover and let stand for a couple of hours at least and, if possible, overnight to let the spice flavours develop.
Oil or butter the pudding basin and spoon in the mixture. As it contains no raw flour, it will not expand very much during the cooking, so you can fill the basin to within 1.35 cm (half an inch) of the rim. Take a square of greaseproof or waxed paper, oil or butter it, and tie it over the top of the basin with string.
Place the filled pudding basin in a saucepan, with a long triplefolded strip of foil under it and coming up both sides. This is to help you lift the boiling hot basin out of the saucepan once it is cooked. Pour in boiling water to go halfway up the pudding basin, cover the saucepan and bring it back to the boil. Then lower the heat and keep the water at a steady simmer so that the pudding steams for five hours. Keep the water level topped up with boiling water.
When the time is up, remove the pudding from the pan and allow it to cool completely before wrapping it, still in the basin, in fresh greaseproof paper plus a layer of foil. Store in a cool, dark place.
On Christmas Day, steam the pudding for a further two hours. Then decorate it with holly, warm some brandy or rum in a ladle and anoint the pudding with it. Remember to turn off the lights before you bring it into the dining room. We prefer to eat it with only a blob of creme fraiche. Brandy butter rather undoes the good of this pudding, which has no fat except for the egg yolks and only the sugar of the dried fruits and the tiny bit of marmalade.
J.McK