#95 – Let’s Make a Christmas Pudding!

What is a Christmas pudding and how did it develop into the U.K.’s favourite festive dessert? What’s inside one and, importantly, how can you make one in your kitchen?

In this episode we’ll talk about the fascinating history of Christmas pudding and then dive into the practicalities of making your very own festive pudding.

What are the ingredients? How can you combine them? What’s the cooking method? How do you serve it and what can you do with the leftovers?

We’ll cover recipes from as far back as 1300 right up to the modern day and you will leave excited and ready to bring to life this traditional British Christmas desert in your own kitchen wherever you live in the world.

We’ll both be cooking up a Christmas pudding this year, we love it if you would join us. Check out the free download with folklore, recipes and tips that’s available for all listeners below.

Thanks to our supporters Andrea and I have recently invested in some new recording equipment. This means that future podcasts will be clearer. But, as we all know, new technologies have teething problems. And we experienced them here. This episode is clear, but, some of it isn’t as high-quality as you are used to from us and we apologise for that. It won’t take away from your enjoyment of Christmas puddings.

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One Earth Health make the grass-fed organ supplements we use and trust. Get 15% off your first order here and 5% off all subsequent orders here.

What we cover:

• Intro to Christmas pudding
• Early history of plum pudding
• Why it’s called plum/figgy pudding
• How it transitioned to the sweet, Christmas pudding we know
• The link with the British Empire
• Home-cooking your own Christmas Pudding
• Stir-up Sunday
• Basic ingredients of a Christmas Pudding, why they are there and how you can vary them/what you can substitute them for
• The different cooking methods, including how to prepare a cloth for boiling
• Aging a Christmas pudding
• Egg-free, gluten-free, modern and historic recipes
• How to serve a Christmas pudding
• What to do with your leftovers

Resources:

Christmas pudding download for all listeners, with history, poetry, recipes and more!

Patrons enjoy a Christmas pudding recipe comparison, specially compiled by Francine so that she (and you!) can see 12 recipes at a glance and build your own pudding!

If you can’t get it locally, where to buy suet in the US:

https://repprovisions.com/products/rep-regenerative-beef-suet?utm_campaign=gs-2021-06-07&utm_source=google&utm_medium=smart_campaign&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwr9m3BhDHARIsANut04apvRiDb7rjLK9Pdq3wdIx1UVTTU-oi085OqA25o-cqjrEJyy_

https://stemplecreek.com/products/beef-suet?srsltid=AfmBOoo8Z0bKT9mfjeCZZFk0kox6SYIR-McJwtXwhn5DExfdQvG03NRE

https://sevensons.net/store/product/beef-suet?srsltid=AfmBOoqYHF0ttZIVqXI3m0m9TNLiFQpXqAI6v5qxF9lzHV2fmap8oE_s

https://arrowheadbeef.com/products/beef-fat-suet?srsltid=AfmBOooGstznO1XTQnkh5Z5rrv9lHl4dqa7d60wIipNCFu-6fZ15EtLq

If you can’t get it locally, where to buy suet in the UK:

https://www.organicbutchery.co.uk/buy/organic-beef-suet-shredded

 

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Transcription:

Alison Kay (00:04)
Hello and welcome back to Ancestral Kitchen podcast for what I think is going to be a really fun episode. I am not with Andrea today. Instead, I am with a patron who has been with us for a long time and is really active on our Discord forum, Francine. Hello, Francine.

Francine (00:23)
How are you? How are you, Alison?

Alison Kay (00:24)
I’m good, thanks, I’m good. I’m very good. I’m excited to dive into this episode, which is about Christmas pudding because you have done so much research for us on this and cooked lots of puddings and I’m really interested to share this information with everyone out there. So before we start, I’m going to ask you what the last thing that you ate was.

Francine (00:50)
The last thing we ate was dinner. It was a cushion pork with Asian, so like a thrown together Asian sauce that I just with rice and it was all slow cooked in the oven on the bone. was our usual Tuesday night hodgepodge.

Alison Kay (01:10)
What’s the thrown together Asian source?

Francine (01:13)
So it’s a bit of soy sauce a bit of homemade hoisin sauce or barbecue sauce if I don’t if I haven’t got around to doing that some marmalade or honey and Ginger and garlic then throw a few beans I No, no, drown it in it. So I boil it on the stove with it for maybe Half an hour

Alison Kay (01:29)
And what you sort of paint that over it, do you, and put it in the oven.

Yeah.

Francine (01:41)
and then I’ll put it in the oven and let it all caramelise and get all sticky on the meat.

Alison Kay (01:49)
Wow, that sounds delicious. As listeners will hear, Francine has an accent. Francine is in Australia. So it’s the middle of the night for her, which is very kind of her to come in in the middle of the night. So her last dinner was obviously, her last food was dinner. For me, my last food was lunch and I had some leftovers from yesterday, which were pork mince, which we’ve…

got. Now as our first portmints we bought from a new supplier because we are in our new home in the UK in Stroud and I chopped in there some duck hearts when I went to the market on Saturday. There’s a supplier there who sells game so everything’s wild and they had a little container of duck hearts so I thought I’ll have those and onion, celery and cabbage. cooked it up yesterday and then put it in the fridge, heated it up and I have mine with

rice. So I had the rice same as you but

Francine (02:49)
and had the rice. That sounds nice. How did the duck hearts go in with the pork mince?

Alison Kay (02:53)
really well, really well. I was kind of thinking, Gabriel’s not going to eat them because he’s getting quite fussy about his offal now. Sometimes some livers he won’t eat. And we’ve never had duck part before, but chopped up small. It’s a lovely texture. It’s a meaty texture. And the flavor is really pleasant because it’s a muscle. It’s not, you know, kind of liver. It’s not such an unusual flavor.

Francine (03:20)
Mm.

Alison Kay (03:21)
And it went really, really well with the pork. Gabriel ate both of them today and yesterday. ate it all. And it’s quite funny after dinner yesterday, I said to him, you know, there were duck hearts in that and he was like, no, but he ate them all again today. So, you know, I’m pleased with that. Okay. We’ve got a lot to get through today. So I’m going to go through the kind of intro stuff quite quickly. I’ve got one review to read, which is on Apple podcast five star.

Francine (03:26)
Excellent.

Alison Kay (03:50)
and it is titled Inspires Truth and Beauty in the Kitchen. I am so happy to have found this podcast. It instantly made it to the top of my favorites. The pleasant way these women present you information on ancestral eating invites you into a whole new world of eating. They speak about food with such truth and simplicity, inspiring me to make my kitchen a place of beauty and creativity. They aren’t harsh or judgmental, but instead encouraging and joyful in the pursuit of nourishment.

I love the peaceful disposition I adopt after hearing an episode. I have thoroughly enjoyed each episode and await what else they have to present. That was submitted by a lady called Isa W. Thank you very much Isa. If you would like to leave the podcast a review and you are on Apple, you can do so. There are instructions for how to do it in the show notes, so you can go check that out if you don’t know how to. I also wanted to mention

that we are up to 100 supporters in our cooking community, which is quite a milestone. Both Andrea and I are over the moon about it. And Francine, as you know, the Discord channel is full of exciting conversations and lots of people are on there every day sharing and it’s just, a wonderful place. You enjoy being on there, don’t you?

Francine (05:01)
this.

It is, it’s good to see all the new people taking part and really sharing. great.

Alison Kay (05:18)
Yeah, yeah, it’s a wonderful place to share and ask questions and get them answered. The other one more thing that I wanted to talk about before we get into Christmas puddings is a reminder of ancestral stories, which is a page that we’ve set up for you to share with us memories that you’ve got from families and friends of cooking traditionally. So whether it be fermentation or foraging, butchering, baking, any

stories of kind of pre-industrial inspired food preparation and food cooking and we want to hear them because we want to save that information for posterity because the further we get away from it the more it’s getting lost. So you can go to ancestralkitchenpodcast.com forward slash ancestral stories and there’s a form there that you can either leave an audio message or type something or send us a photograph so please do that if you’ve got something you think would fit.

Okay, let’s dive into today’s topic, which is Christmas pudding. Now, the first thing I wanted to do was actually introduce the Christmas pudding because Andrea said to me that most Americans really don’t know much about Christmas pudding. So just at this beginning, I will say that a Christmas pudding is a steamed fruity pudding that is served traditionally on Christmas day in the UK and previous UK territories, I should say, with an Australian doing the episode with me.

Francine (06:48)
You

Alison Kay (06:48)
And Andrea had said to me that the thing she knew most about Christmas pudding was that she’d read about it in Charles Dickens, in A Christmas Carol. So I wanted to read, to start us off by reading a quote, that quote from Christmas Carol, which is quite famous about the Christmas pudding. So I think it sets us up really well. So here goes. Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone, too nervous to bear witness, to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough. Suppose it should break in turning out. Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the backyard and stolen it while they were merry with the goose. A supposition at which the two young cratchits became livid. All sorts of horrors were supposed. Hello, a great deal of steam. The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a wash day. That was the cloth.

A smell like an eating house and a pastry cooks next door to each other with the lawn dresses next door to that. That was the pudding. In half a minute, Mrs. Cratchit entered flushed, but smiling proudly with the pudding like a speckled cannonball so hard and firm blazing in half of half a quarter of ignited brandy and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top. what a wonderful pudding.

That’s from chapter three of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. So what we’re to talk about in this episode is what a Christmas pudding is, its history. We are going to give you some recipes that Francine has done an incredible amount of research on from, right, going back hundreds and hundreds of years, right to modern cooks. And we’re also going to share our own experiences with cooking up puddings, which we’ve been doing. I did one in July, which was quite surprising.

thought everyone enjoyed it. And the idea of this is that we love to cook one up with you. And there will be a download, which Andrea is putting together, which has recipes in it, lots of kind of history of the Christmas pudding and other festive things. You’ll be able to find that at our website, which is ancestral kitchen podcast, forward slash episodes, forward slash downloads.

Francine (08:45)
you

Alison Kay (09:10)
Okay, so let’s start with the Christmas pudding and its history in particular. Now Francine, you’ve done so much research here. Do you want to kick us off and talk to us about the history of the Christmas pudding?

Francine (09:23)
Certainly, I think it’s fairly accepted that the earliest form of What sounded like a modern-day Christmas what we understand as a Christmas pudding came from a 1393 cookbook called form of curry Which was presented to Queen Elizabeth the first and based on The recipes used by the master cooks of King Richard the second and that was a

A pudding of almonds, wine, raisins, figs, ginger and honey. The other references in the early fifth and then we move on to the early 16th century. It’s referenced as a more like a plum potage which was heavy on meat and root vegetables served at the start of a meal.

and

In the 1500s the first mention of puddings as part of the Christmas tradition was in a Thomas Tusser poem, Christmas Cheer.

Alison Kay (10:29)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Francine (10:38)
and where it mentions that good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall, brawn pudding and sauce and good mustard with all. So that it was clearly part, a pudding of some description was clearly part, an expected part of a Christmas feast.

Alison Kay (10:55)
So the thing I want to jump in with immediately is that you said mustard and you talked about meats. And of course nowadays we think of a pudding as sweet. And even anyone in the UK and us who’ve made Christmas puddings and the recipes we’re going to give out later, they are completely sweet. And yet these early puddings, firstly, they weren’t really shaped like a pudding. They were more like a porridgey kind of oatmeal-y kind of consistency.

Francine (11:07)
Mm.

That’s right and quite off.

Alison Kay (11:25)
And they also had meat in as well, which is kind of completely out of what our kind of understanding of puddings are.

Francine (11:29)
Yes.

Yes, and often they were put into a stomach similar to what haggis, how haggis is cooked.

Alison Kay (11:42)
Okay.

Francine (11:44)
I believe by the end of that century, by the end of the 16th century, they started using the pudding cloth which freed it up from, which was maybe the start of it, turning back into more of a sweet pudding.

Alison Kay (11:52)
Mm-hmm.

So do you think at the beginning it wasn’t in anything? Do you think it was just served in a bowl like a kind of a soupy stewy thing and then it went to the kind of stomach casing and then it went to the cloth or do you think it was always in the stomach casing?

Francine (12:15)
I think it was probably a case of what the cook had on hand, to be honest. But it seems to have been either. Or a pudding could have been either. Or a pottage was without and a pudding was in the intestines, in the stomach.

Alison Kay (12:20)
Yeah.

Yeah okay. Also that early recipe that you talked about, the 1390s one, you said it had almonds in it but puddings later and puddings now have a grain in them, you whether it’s breadcrumbs or flour, something like that. So those early versions, it sound like at least that one, that didn’t have any grain in at all, right?

Francine (12:43)
Mm. Yes.

Mm.

No, no grain in it. Because I did actually find a copy of that book and looked up the ingredients.

Alison Kay (13:02)
Interesting.

Interesting. Okay. What about the 1649 source that you had from it? Was it a poem called A Voyage to Virginia?

Francine (13:19)
And now it was a ship’s log.

Alison Kay (13:21)
okay, and what’s in that?

Francine (13:24)
Sorry, I’ve just got to find the… Too many notes here.

Alison Kay (13:26)
Mm-hmm. Copious notes. I’ve got all the notes as well that Francine’s got and there are pages and pages of them. Fascinating.

Francine (13:36)
It was…

highlighted I’m sorry about this. so

Alison Kay (13:42)
That’s okay.

Francine (13:48)
They were off the west coast of Crete and it was in the diary of a British naval captain and it was the quote from that diary was, a captain had all his officers and gentlemen to dinner with him where we had excellent good fare, a rib of beef, plum puddings and mince pies, et cetera, and plenty of good wines of several sorts. So a plum pudding was…

Alison Kay (13:54)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Francine (14:17)
part of the fair on an Able ship.

Alison Kay (14:21)
And you also said that usually it’s a starter as well. Whereas back then, yeah, whereas now it’s a dessert very definitely. Okay.

Francine (14:26)
Yes, I did find a reference to it being a starter.

That’s right. There was also another reference on a voyage to Virginia, again on board an Able ship, and it was a fairly miserable Christmas by the sounds of it. But the highlight of that…

very poor Christmas feast was a Christmas pudding. But allowing some privilege to the Captain’s Mess we met no obstruction but did peaceably enjoy our Christmas pudding.

Alison Kay (15:05)
Let’s talk about the fact that it’s kind of called Figgy Pudding sometimes and there is a famous song which I Andrea has put into the downloads and which includes Figgy Pudding and sometimes it’s called Plum Pudding which makes me think that it would have figs in it and it would have plums in it but that’s not necessarily the case is it? Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Francine (15:17)
Mm-hmm.

So the reference to plums, believe raisins were when they were loose, but when they were in a dish they were called plums. Dried fruit was called plums and that was from the 1755 dictionary by Dr. Johnson. And I believe the reference to figgy is that it speckled like the inside of a fig with all the dried fruit.

Alison Kay (15:37)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Okay, because of the dried fruit that’s in it. Yeah. Okay. So that kind of, answers a question. When I read your notes on that, that answered a question that I had for ages because I’d seen all these references to plum pudding and yet all the recipes that I’ve seen didn’t have plums in it. And I was like, why now? it called plums pudding? Plum pudding. And thanks to you showing me that it’s basically that raisins were called plums when they were inside something that was cooked like a pudding.

Francine (16:12)
No.

Mmm.

Alison Kay (16:25)
And yet when you ate them without cooking, they were called raisins. Which just seems confusing to me mightily because there is another fruit called plum. So you’d think it would be plum, but no. Okay. Is there anything else you want to add to that kind of early history before I go on and talk about how that kind of began to change?

Francine (16:25)
Yes.

No, I think that pretty much covers the earlier days before it became connected with Christmas and transitioned to a sweet dish.

Alison Kay (16:51)
Okay.

Yeah, yeah, okay. So that early dish was really nothing like we have on our Christmas dinner tables in these modern days. It was, as we’ve said, meaty. It may or may not have been put inside a skin or a cloth. It was cooked very differently. But slowly, as time went on, that pudding changed.

from being something that had meat in to something that was completely sweet. And from the research that you’ve done Francine, it kind of seems to be that that happened in the 1800s. And I guess we tie that with the fact that that was a period when there was more dried fruit available in the UK because of better transports. And I mean, there may have been dried fruit before that and there was dried fruit in those other puddings, but it would have been much, much more expensive.

So as time went on and transport improved and foods were able to be shipped more, then more people could afford to put dried fruit and more dried fruit into their puddings. So I have a book by Liza Acton, who is, I love the book. She wrote a lot of recipes that Mrs. Beaton then took and put in her later more famous cookbook.

Eliza Acton’s book was published in 1845. It’s called Modern Cookery and she’s one of the first people to use the word Christmas pudding associated with this type of pudding before. Although it had been eaten at Christmas, it wasn’t actually called a Christmas pudding. And really by the mid 1800s, we see sweet recipes coming out and those recipes have suet, raisins, currants, citrus peel, eggs, breadcrumbs and flour.

and nutmeg, cloves and allspice and alcohol as well. And then as you found out Francine, by Christmas of 1831, merchants in Australia were promoting sales of all of the ingredients that you needed to make Christmas pudding. So it seems that really by the further you go on into the 1800s, the more that old style meaty pudding is left behind and it changes more into

a dessert, a rich, sticky dessert. Do you wanna talk then Francine about how that moves into, from the 1800s into how we’ve got our modern kind of development of the Christmas pudding?

Francine (19:26)
Yeah, that’s right.

There seemed to be, so in that sort of mid-1800s, a former chef for Queen Victoria also published a Christmas pudding recipe and it’s quite interesting. So in 1831 it was

Alison Kay (19:49)
Okay.

Francine (20:00)
promoted in furthest reaches of the furthest colonies in Australia. So it must have been a well established Christmas custom by the 1830s. Then in the 1840s you’ve got Eliza Acton. But actually prior to her, Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843. his book and then

Alison Kay (20:24)
Okay.

Francine (20:28)
that must have prompted the interest for an easily accessible recipe for private kitchens.

Alison Kay (20:35)
Yep.

Francine (20:42)
So coming through to the beginning of the 20th century, one interesting little fact that I found is that an early… Of course I’ve lost my reference again, haven’t I?

Alison Kay (20:57)
Mm-hmm.

Francine (21:04)
Sir J.J. Thompson’s discovery of the structure of atoms, he promoted a structure of an atom which was dubbed by the press as the plum pudding model because it was a round circle with pluses and minuses in it and it looked like a Christmas pudding.

Alison Kay (21:27)
Okay.

Francine (21:27)
So that was in 1908 I believe, it was quickly debunked but for a moment physics also reflected the popularity of the plum pudding. Then by the end of the First World War in 1920s the British…

Alison Kay (21:39)
Okay.

Francine (21:51)
British Women’s Patriotic League promoted using ingredients from the Empire, so Jamaican rum, Australian rum, than French brandy, and spices from, so dried fruit from Australia and South Africa, and spices from India, I believe.

Alison Kay (22:06)
Okay.

Francine (22:19)
And there was a great big promotional video that was created because the Empire Board I believe got on the act fairly soon afterwards and a great big promotional video featuring all these ingredients from Far Reaches of the Empire was filmed with Great Pumpkin Ceremony and then

you didn’t see them as throughout the Empire it’s a bit of a…

I it would have been a bit of a…

celebration after such a dark time.

Alison Kay (23:04)
Hmm.

Francine (23:12)
Then after the second world war, Australia sent special care packages of Christmas pudding ingredients to the UK families who were still under food rationing in the aftermath of World War II. So it’s…

Alison Kay (23:23)
Okay.

Okay.

Francine (23:36)
It’s quite, and it’s continued its popularity so that I believe in the UK there are 25 million Christmas puddings still sold but all produced by the one company apart from a few maybe boutique ones.

Alison Kay (23:53)
Yeah, that thing, I mean, what you’ve just talked about there with the Empire Link was something that me being a Christmas pudding eater all my life, I did not realise. I didn’t know that it had been really, that Christmas pudding had been taken by the governing bodies around that time and used as a symbolism of Britain’s imperialism and used as a way to help support

Francine (24:10)
you

Alison Kay (24:22)
the colonies financially by saying, okay, we can make this pudding and it’s got all of these ingredients in it that come from British colonies. And so you can buy your raisins from Australia, you can buy your rum in Jamaica, you can buy things that come from the empire. And actually you sending me all this information and sharing it with me has kind of been a history lesson a bit for me because I mean, although I know about the British empire and the

the terrible things as well that were part of it. I didn’t realise it was so big that it was at its height a fifth of the world’s land surface and a quarter of the world’s population. And I’ve watched that film that you sent me of kind of an advert using the Christmas pudding as an advert and the government being there showing how they were making it and showing how all the ingredients were coming from all the different places. And

I just, I was completely surprised because I’m just, you know, I grew up with my mum sometimes making a Christmas pudding and then later on being one of those ones that were bought, like you’re saying, you know, the UK eats 25 million Christmas puddings each year, but as we found out, most of them are made by one company. And of course it feels a bit kind of funny to me that

when you buy Christmas pudding like that, comes in plastic packaging and it’s wrapped in cardboard and that’s 25 million pieces of plastic and 25 million pieces of cardboard packaging that aren’t actually necessary because we can have some fun in our own kitchens recreating Christmas puddings.

Francine (26:03)
Mmm.

Alison Kay (27:47)
Okay, so let’s talk about home cooking a Christmas pudding, which is something that we can all do and is fun. And as you will see, there are many different ways of doing it and you can kind of customize your recipe for what you would particularly like to eat. We will talk about the basic ingredients and alternatives. First of all, I want to talk about when you cook it, because that was actually one of the questions that Andrea

asked me to cover, she kind of didn’t understand. So first of all there is a traditional day to make your Christmas pudding which is why we’re putting this episode out now so you can listen to it and then if you want to you can join in and make your Christmas pudding on the traditional day which is called Stir Up Sunday and this year in 2024 it’s on Sunday November the 24th in the UK.

And that is called Stare Up Sunday from the collect that is associated with that Sunday in the liturgy, which comes from originally the 1549 Book of Common Prayer in the UK. And that collect says, Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people, that they plenteously bring forth the fruit of good works, may by thee plenteously be rewarded.

That kind of reminder, I think, of hearing those words stir up in the church must have just reminded people, okay, I’ve got to stir up my Christmas pudding. And it just became associated with that Sunday, which is the fifth Sunday before Christmas. So you can work that out, you know, depending on when Christmas is, you’re listening to this in a few years time and it’s not 2024 anymore, then you can figure out the fifth Sunday before Christmas, which is the traditional day to actually cook your Christmas pudding. So.

You can tell from that that actually you’re going to leave the Christmas pudding quite a long time to mature. And we’ll talk about, you know, whether you’ve got to feed it with alcohol a bit later. But first of all, let’s talk about the basic ingredients of the Christmas pudding, kind of why they’re there and potential choices that you have. So Francine, you’ve done a document which details the different ingredients. Could you talk…

us through it so we understand what needs to go into that pudding and why it’s there.

Francine (30:20)
Certainly it’s so flexible. What I found, comes down to having a fat of some kind, dried fruit of some kind, and stuff to bind it together with some spices and some alcohol, which was traditionally to help with the preservation. So with the fat…

Alison Kay (30:46)
Yeah. What fat is it? Talk to us about the fat first.

Francine (30:50)
suet is the traditional fat that you see most regularly with plum pudding recipes. So suet is the hard crumbly fat around the kidneys of around beef kidneys.

Alison Kay (30:58)
Okay, and what’s SUIT?

Francine (31:11)
and it’s particularly good for getting that nice light fluffy texture that you want in a Christmas pudding.

Alison Kay (31:22)
Do you know why it does that or why it’s better than butter or some other fat?

Francine (31:26)
I believe it is the make-up of the lipids in the fat. So it’s the structure of the fat. And you ca-

Alison Kay (31:34)
Right, okay. What’s interesting about that, what’s interesting about that suet thing is that both of us used suet to cook our puddings. And quite amusingly, I didn’t know, I had this suet, which I’d had delivered and I thought it needed to be rendered. And I remember getting to the recipe and thinking, I’ve got this suet. I haven’t rendered it. my gosh, I’ve got to render it. need to make, I need to render this. So I put it into a pan.

Francine (31:45)
Hmm.

Alison Kay (32:03)
and I melted it down and I got some suet out, liquid, and I let it set and then I grated my suet and put it into the pudding. But turns out I didn’t need to do that because you’ve since told me that you can just use it straight, yeah, literally.

Francine (32:14)
No.

Absolutely, and I have to admit the first Christmas pudding I made I had the same thought do I need to render it? And it got to the point where if I render it, it’s never going to get done It’s going in as it is and it can be fed to the chooks if it’s terrible If the pudding doesn’t work out it can be fit and it was perfect. It was was a really nice pudding. Sorry So you can use tallow if you can

Alison Kay (32:36)
Okay, and it wasn’t.

Yeah, okay. Excellent.

Right, okay, which is how is that different from SUIC? Can you explain that?

Francine (32:50)
So, suet is the unprocessed fat from the beef kidney. Suet is rendered fat from anywhere in the beast. Sorry, the tallow. Sorry, my bad. Yes, it’s rendered fats. Basically, Correct, yeah.

Alison Kay (32:54)
Right, okay.

So the tallow you mean is rendered fat? Yeah. So that’s what I used actually, isn’t it? I ended up using tallow if you were going to be pernickety about it, because I rendered it. Okay. So I was okay because you can use that. Okay. I know some people have problems getting suet. So we did some research and I’ve put some links into the show notes for this episode for some places you can get suet in the States and in the UK. You got yours.

Francine (33:14)
Yes.

Yes.

Alison Kay (33:29)
just from your local butcher, didn’t you?

Francine (33:32)
right yeah. If you can’t get suet and you can get tallow that’s

Alison Kay (33:33)
Okay.

Hmm.

Francine (33:39)
probably you didn’t find any objection about the pudding you made did you with just the tallow? And also with those two, they’re ones that you need a longer boiling time for. So four to eight hours is how long you boil a suet or tallow pudding. You can also use butter, so if you’re a bit pressed for time, you can use butter, but you wouldn’t want

Alison Kay (33:44)
No, it was lovely.

Okay.

wow.

Francine (34:09)
to boil it for more than four hours.

Alison Kay (34:11)
Okay, so in the document that Andrea’s done, there are recipes and there is one that has butter instead of tallow or suet. And there are others that have tallow or suet. Interestingly, I used tallow and I only boiled mine for three hours and it was fine. Everyone loved it and no one got ill. So maybe there’s a little bit of leeway there. I feel like, I don’t know, it…

Francine (34:30)
Mm.

You

Yeah, delete the link, sorry.

Alison Kay (34:41)
It was fine. it’s interesting that butter you can’t. I think maybe that’s more of a kind of important thing. If it’s butter, you shouldn’t do it for a bit longer. You should do it shorter, you think?

Francine (34:52)
Yes, and I found that suet and tallow is better cloth if you’re boiling in a cloth, maybe because it sort of sticks better, like how runny butter and how it can separate with the milk fats, and where butter is supposed to be better suited for a mould or a pudding basin.

Alison Kay (34:58)
Okay.

Yeah.

Okay, so we will get to talking about cloths or basins in a moment. Let’s go back to the ingredients and move on to, apart from fat, what else have we got in there?

Francine (35:19)
sorry, I’ll just say one more thing on the fat. the length of boiling will affect the pudding’s color and make it darker and richer. If you can’t tolerate butter and can’t so soot or tallow, other like coconut oil is also possible. You can also use that, substitute that.

Alison Kay (35:21)
Yeah, no, sorry, go on. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay, that’s awesome, thank you. Okay, let’s move on to one of the other ingredients.

Francine (35:49)
So the next main ingredient would be the dried fruit. So you’ve got your raisins, sultanas, currants, are the traditional choices, but they can be substituted for any dried fruit. I found quite…

Alison Kay (35:53)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so I could literally put like dried apricots or you know just chop it up small and yeah.

Francine (36:08)
you could go all tropical fruits which might suit the coconut oil a bit better and you always generally find citrus peel in the recipe or zest and sometimes juice but that can be left out on a taste basis.

Alison Kay (36:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, I didn’t put citrus peel in mine. I just had raisins and sultanas, I think. Okay, what’s next?

Francine (36:31)
Mm-hmm.

Then spices, you’ve got nutmeg, cloves, allspice, mixed spice and cinnamon. Through the recipes I looked at the combinations and quantities vary considerably and you can tinker with that to suit your taste I think is the takeaway from that.

Alison Kay (36:35)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, I always used to get confused at the difference between mixed spice and allspice and I have learned over the last couple of years, probably something that many listeners know already, that allspice is an actual individual spice, a berry. And I now have the berries in my kitchen, which I grind, mixed spice is a mixture of three or four different spices. I really like allspice and I put some of that in mine. What spices have you used in the puddings that you’ve made, Francine?

Francine (37:23)
I love cloves so it was cloves, cinnamon and allspice I think were the one I made last Christmas and I was trying to follow the recipe because I made a pudding in July as well and I tried to that recipe and just used nutmeg but I missed the cloves and allspice to be honest.

Alison Kay (37:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised. Okay, and do they need to be freshly ground? I’m guessing freshly ground is better, but if you don’t have that, you could just use the packets.

Francine (37:52)
I think it’s probably better but just as fresh as you can get access to.

Alison Kay (37:58)
Okay. Okay, what next?

Francine (38:01)
I Then you’ve got a binder. You’ve got flour, breadcrumbs and eggs which help hold everything together. There seems to be no hard and fast rule about the ratios or quantities or the type of flour and breadcrumbs. So I’ve seen recipes with almond flour.

Alison Kay (38:09)
Okay.

Francine (38:25)
Bread crumbs in those older recipes probably just would have been the stale crust of bread grated into the pudding. You could probably use rice flour or oats if you had the need to avoid gluten or you had an allergy to wheat flour. It’s just really something to stick all the…

Alison Kay (38:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Francine (38:53)
other stuff together and to give it that sort of cakey, that heavy cake sort of texture in between the fruit.

Alison Kay (38:55)
Yeah.

So I didn’t use eggs because Gabriel has an intolerance to eggs and one of the recipes that is in the download, which you can get, doesn’t have eggs in it. That’s the recipe I used. And interestingly, you you said you can switch up ingredients. It said flour, plain flour and normal wheat breadcrumbs. And of course I don’t have normal wheat breadcrumbs and I don’t have plain flour in my kitchen. So I used sourdough rye breadcrumbs because I had a sourdough rye left over and spelt flour.

Francine (39:03)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (39:30)
and it held together fine, know, with no eggs, literally, it held together fine. In actual fact, I think the rye was really nice with it because rye’s got that real deep kind of rich flavour which paired really nicely with all the other ingredients in it. So like you’ve said though, I’d echo the fact that, you know, you can use what you’ve got and if you can’t have gluten, use a flour, breadcrumbs are gluten-free. If you can’t have eggs, find the go and get the download and…

Francine (39:54)
Yeah, so cute.

Alison Kay (39:59)
find the recipe without eggs and use that as a guide.

Francine (40:02)
That’s right, and I did find a, I even looked at vegan recipes. So I did find a comment that aquafaba, which I think is the liquid from chickpeas, worked the best as a non-egg substitute if you really wanted to make sure everything stuck together but couldn’t have eggs.

Alison Kay (40:13)
yeah. Yeah.

Okay, interesting. Okay.

Francine (40:27)
So just as a one whole egg equals three tablespoons of that aquafaba.

Alison Kay (40:33)
Okay, and people can find online articles on how to make that aquafaba, can’t they? I’ve seen those. Cool. Okay, so let’s talk about the alcohol then.

Francine (40:38)
That’s right. Yay.

we’ve got sugar first, sweetener. It’s okay, we’ve got to keep things sweet. So again, whatever you’ve got in the cupboard, dark sugar, light sugar, probably white sugar would go at a pinch, molasses, treacle, and you could probably omit it all together if you didn’t have a particularly sweet tooth. Some recipes had grated apple.

Alison Kay (40:44)
sorry, sorry. Okay, sugar. Go on then.

Yeah.

Francine (41:07)
which would have a sweetness and I think in the Eliza Acton book that you shared with me she used potatoes and carrots.

Alison Kay (41:16)
Yeah, which is not something I’ve tried.

Francine (41:20)
No, I could sort of see carrots being quite nice and sweet, but I’m not sure about the potatoes.

Alison Kay (41:26)
Yeah, so treacle is kind of the equivalent of molasses syrup in the US. I know that in the US, of, Andrew will probably be going, treacle? What’s that? But it’s a very, very dark kind of leftover from sugar refining processes syrup, pretty similar to molasses and those deep kind of flavours.

Francine (41:39)
Mmm.

Yeah, sort of more like a dark golden syrup. always think of molasses as being very heavy, minerally type flavoured. Stronger, yeah, stronger.

Alison Kay (41:55)
Yeah, stronger. Yeah.

I put less sweetener in my pudding. I saw the dried fruit going in and I thought we don’t, know, the boys are used to not, you know, a little bit of sweetness and they taste it. So I just thought we don’t need all the sugar. So I put less sugar in and I put that in my little notes on the document that you can download how I changed my recipe. But if I did it again, I would probably use even less sugar, I think, than I did. So there’s certainly for…

Francine (42:00)
So.

Hmm.

night.

Alison Kay (42:30)
a palette that’s not used to so many sweet things like a lot of listeners have sugar consumption is low, then probably you can cut down, like you said, on that sugar.

Francine (42:34)
Hmm.

Yes, as I said, there was grated apple, think. I didn’t write it in my notes, but there was also sometimes a bit of orange juice, so you could probably throw in a little bit of juice if you’d rather that sort of sugar profile rather than processed sugar.

Alison Kay (42:59)
It’s interesting that you mention orange juice because now, you the last thing that I don’t think I forgot anything else is the alcohol. And I wonder, can you substitute fruit juice for alcohol or do you definitely need the alcohol in it?

Francine (43:12)
I can’t see why you couldn’t. The alcohol was traditionally there I think as a preservative which allowed you to cook it on that stirrup sundae and then let it hang in the pantry until Christmas. So there were references of

Alison Kay (43:21)
Mm.

Mm.

Francine (43:42)
being able to boil the pudding straight after Easter and then you just top it up with a bit of brandy or rum in the interseeding months so that it stayed hydrated and could be stored.

Alison Kay (43:56)
Gosh.

Wow, so you could literally store it virtually the whole year just by feeding it with alcohol as a preservative.

Francine (44:08)
Yes, yeah, and that I suppose would mean that you could take advantage of seasonal fruit that you could try.

Alison Kay (44:15)
Yeah, that makes sense. So do you think if people wanted to use fruit juice instead of alcohol that they probably shouldn’t make it that far in advance to Christmas Day because it won’t keep?

Francine (44:27)
I think it’s a bit different. We’ve got fridges so storing it in a fridge would keep it but I don’t think, I don’t know, don’t know if I’d want to keep it five weeks. But a lot of the recipes, modern recipes, they say that you can just basically serve it to the table from the first boil rather than doing a first boil and then a second boil just before serving three or four weeks later.

Alison Kay (44:32)
Okay.

Yeah, if you weren’t using alcohol.

Yeah, we did. So I just boiled mine and then we ate it. I didn’t keep it and then, you know, re-boil it to heat it up. When we talk about the cooking, I want to touch on that re-boiling to heat up because I know we haven’t talked about that and we haven’t particularly written it down. So I’m trying to make a mental note of that. Okay. So what alcohol have you used in yours?

Francine (44:58)
Mm.

We usually use rum because that’s just it.

that’s what we have on hand. This time I couldn’t get hold of rum. I had gone to the shops to get the dried fruit so many times because my children kept finding it and eating the dried fruit. And when I found out there was no rum in the fridge I refused to go to the shops again so I used some spiced mead that I’d made.

Alison Kay (45:42)
dear.

Okay.

Francine (45:48)
And that worked fine, that worked quite nice. Probably could have done with a little bit less sugar because of that honey flavour through it, if I have to use meat again I wouldn’t put sugar in it.

Alison Kay (45:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Okay, I get that. So I used stout, a bottle of stout, which went very well with all the other flavours. I’d like to use some of my ancestral ale in it, because I feel like that would be a nice harmony, it an ale that is kind of authentic, and then putting it in a Christmas pudding as well. Yeah, and then I didn’t have any, because I was in between houses, living at my mother-in-law’s house, making a Christmas pudding in July.

Francine (46:18)
Mmm, that’s what I was hoping you’d use. I thought you said you.

Mm.

Alison Kay (46:29)
I didn’t have any ancestral ale. Now we’re in this new house, then hopefully over the next few months I’ll get into more routines back into my kitchen. know, the ale takes a fair bit of organisation and then the next Christmas pudding maybe I’m going to put ale in it, which will be nice. Okay, anything else on the ingredients that you haven’t shared before we move on to cooking?

Francine (46:29)
You

I’ll just say with the alcohol it’s usually used to soak the dried fruit prior to mixing in with the rest of the ingredients. So you’re basically using it to rehydrate the fruit.

Alison Kay (47:00)
Okay.

Francine (47:04)
So that’s where the apple juice or orange juice could be used. Some recipes just say to add it the night before. Other recipes were a lot more generous and were basically keep adding, you know, quarter of a, know, 30 mils or so of…

alcohol until the fruit is nice and plump over the course of a week. So it depends on time, your preference, taste preferences and just do what suits you in that particular cooking of the pudding.

Alison Kay (47:31)
Okay.

Yeah. Cool. Okay. Let’s talk about cooking methods then, because you did yours slightly different to the way I cooked mine. Talk about the kind of options that you have for cooking these puddings.

Francine (47:55)
Okay so you’ve got the traditional Christmas cloth pudding. So it’s a calico cloth and it needs a little bit of preparation prior to filling it with pudding. Then you’ve got the pudding molds, they became really popular in the 1850s and were considered more hygienic. And then we’ve got the pudding basins.

which I haven’t actually used. So I think the basins usually have their own lids, the ones that I’ve seen. I’ve got two in my cupboard and I think I used one one years ago and all the water came in and I’m not going to use it again.

Alison Kay (48:26)
What’s the difference between a mould and a basin?

okay. No, that’s a bit of a rubbish pudding basin. Okay. So I used a basin then, that, no, sorry, a mould. I used a mould if that was the case, because mine didn’t have a lid. It was just basically a ceramic bowl. And I think my recipe that is in the download says what size your bowl needs to be. So I remember measuring the bowl by putting liquid in it and then measuring what the liquid was to see how big it was, because I wasn’t sure.

Francine (48:44)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (49:07)
but it’s like one of those really old ceramic white kind of creamy bowls that I think used to be my grandmas or something. I cooked mine in there but I covered it over the top with aluminium foil and then tied that foil round just underneath the lip at the top of the basin and then I put mine in a large saucepan with an upturned

Francine (49:07)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (49:37)
metal small bowl in the bottom. So I’d filled up my saucepan with like maybe two inches of water, five centimeters of water and put my upturned metal bowl in the bottom in order to raise my pudding off the bottom. So it was just steaming, not in the boiling water. And then that was obviously covered in the aluminium foil. And then I put the lid on.

Francine (49:40)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (50:05)
And then I just had to watch to make sure that that water was still kind of simmering, you make sure I had the right temperature on my hob and then watching also because my, the lid of my saucepan wasn’t completely airtight. And so the water level did go down and obviously I don’t want it to boil dry. So I think a couple of times during the steaming, I had to just open the saucepan and pour a little bit more water around the edge to keep that level up. think using a mould like that is so…

So easy, I mean, even just putting the foil over the top, didn’t take much time at all. A cloth is earlier than those basins and much more hard work. Can you talk about what you have to do to the cloth if you want to be that kind of authentic oldie-woldie in order for it to work? And then how you suspend the cloth in your pan? Because I haven’t done that, Francine.

Francine (51:00)
Certainly, it’s, so you need to cut the calico square to a decent size. Don’t be stingy with the size of the cloth that you use. And then you have to soak it in cold water. So it’s, for a little while.

then you bring that water to the boil. If it’s a new cloth you boil it for about 20 minutes, if you’re reusing a cloth you probably only need to boil it for about five minutes and that’s just to get the cloth completely wet and hot and get it soft.

This is the painful bit. You’ve got to remove it from the pot and ring it out while it’s really hot I use gloves and tongs and

Alison Kay (51:45)
Hmm.

Francine (51:53)
a little bit of grumbling. And then you spread it out on your bench and you put generous amounts of flour on the cloth, on the hot wet cloth, and then you really rub it in. So you’re actually pushing the flour into the fabric of the cloth and that…

Alison Kay (51:55)
Yeah.

I see.

Francine (52:13)
So really making sure there’s no empty spaces across the whole square of the cloth, not just where you’re putting the pudding. And once that’s done, you put your pudding mixture into the center of the cloth and bring up the corners and then the edges and then…

gather it up right on top of the pudding and wrap kitchen strings so make sure it’s the proper cotton stuff because you’re going to be boiling it in with your pudding you don’t want the synthetic twine and you tie it as close to the pudding as possible and you tie it really tight and then you wrap it round and round again and tie knots in it more and I always break the string and

Alison Kay (52:47)
Yeah.

So did you manage to get it into an actual ball like it was, you know, how they were before? Okay, cool.

Francine (53:04)
Yes, it balls up quite nicely and then you can sort of move it into shape if it’s a bit skew-with. And again, you use the trivet or the upside down plate in the bottom of a pot and you want to completely submerge the pudding.

I’m always worried about it turning upside down and getting water in it so I put a spatula across the top and just tie the string to the spatula so it stays upright. But you don’t need to, I’ve been told. I just… Yes. So I throw it in a stock pot.

Alison Kay (53:36)
Okay, so you’ve got water all the way up the sides of that cloth and pudding.

Francine (53:45)
and somehow tie the string to something you don’t need to.

Alison Kay (53:49)
And then how do you put the lid on of your pot if you’ve got a wooden spoon balancing it?

Francine (53:53)
you just sort of balance it all together so it’s it’s not properly sealed and then then you just keep an eye that the water stays up and it needs to be you need to put it into a boiling pot so into boiling water and then you keep it at a rolling boil

Alison Kay (53:55)
balance it on the top. Okay, do the best you can. Okay.

right

Okay. Did you have to top up your water when you were doing it like that? Yeah, yeah, okay.

Francine (54:15)
plenty of times. And I think the best part of it, the Christmas Carol quote where it describes the house.

that it’s not like a washing day, smell of the cloth. I went to town and I came back and I left my husband and my older son in charge of keeping the water topped up and I walked in and that quote just instantly whacked me on the face. You could smell what a washing day would have and then that pastry smell coming through the steam as well. was…

Alison Kay (54:31)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Wow.

Mm.

Francine (54:59)
quite… it was! And just that quote was such a vivid detail of what it must have… what it was like.

Alison Kay (54:59)
Like stepping back in time. Yeah.

Have you done that cloth method for all of your puddings or have you done a mould or a basin? you said you’d done a basin before, didn’t you?

Francine (55:20)
No, I tried a basin. think because I got complacent with the lids, I can just put bit of baking paper on top and then put the lid on.

And I must have had the water too high or something, I quite like the… I only do it once a year, generally. So it’s special for Christmas. I think if I made a middle of the year or just a plum pudding for like a Christmas and July party or something like that, I wouldn’t bother with the cloth. I’d try and work out the basin.

Alison Kay (55:40)
Clothing is a nice thing.

The basin. Yeah, I’ve got a question about the basin now. Just talking about it more has made me think. So when you had that basin that went wrong, you had water all out that basin in a boiling situation because you said the water came over.

Francine (56:09)
I must have had it too high. I don’t think I put it over but I mustn’t have left enough room. That must have been splashing in.

Alison Kay (56:17)
So when I did mine in my mould, I literally didn’t have any of it in the water. And I don’t know, is there just, are there two ways of doing it that you can steam it without any water and you can boil it? Is there any link with those? you know, depending on what, whether you use a cloth or whether you use a mould or is it, do you know? Hmm.

Francine (56:23)
Mmm.

That’s a really good question. I probably put too much water in it because I was used to doing it in a cloth and didn’t even think about it and looked at it and scratched your head and you go, I’ll try this.

Alison Kay (56:41)
Okay, maybe.

Yeah, you know, I remember my grandma making Christmas puddings when I was very young. And I think she put it in a cloth in a basin. It’s kind of all coming back to me now we’re talking because I remember seeing the basin with a cloth, the pudding in it, but a cloth tied up on the top of it. So it’s almost as if she had a basin, then she lined it with cloth and then she tied the cloth at the top. And I think she must have steamed it, not boiled it. I wish I could go back and ask her.

Francine (57:08)
Mmm.

Yeah. Just looking at that quote again, just that anxiety of it turning out. Yeah.

Alison Kay (57:18)
was too long ago now.

Yeah, it was a big anxiety. Even when I only steamed mine for three hours, it was a big thing. So this thing’s been on the stove. What goes on our stove really for more than three hours these days? Not much. You the slow cooker, but that’s not quite such an event, you know, putting a beef stew on overnight. But this was, this has been on and the house starts to smell. And I didn’t have the cloth smell, but I still had the spices and the alcohol and the fruit, all the smells in the house.

Francine (57:30)
Mmm.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. No.

Stock. Stock, that’s about it.

Mmm.

Alison Kay (57:54)
And of course I was worried it was going to get stuck in the basin. So, you know, it was a big thing. Yeah, what were you going to say? Yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah, did. Yeah. I was still worried it was going to get stuck. You know, because sometimes I put grease and things on my bread tins and for some reason the bread doesn’t come out, you know. I’m not foolproof in my greasing method. So I was still kind of, and I was worried it wasn’t going to stick together because I…

Francine (57:58)
Did you grease the basin before you put it in there?

That’s right.

Alison Kay (58:21)
I did the one without eggs, so thought it was going to get stuck and it’s just going to come apart. But it came out flawlessly, like literally flawlessly. I did take photos, so I think I might try to, I think I should send some of those to Andrea and get her to put them in the document so people can actually see the pudding that I made because it just looks beautiful. Okay, so let’s talk about, I wanted to ask, what was the question I wanted to ask about?

Francine (58:27)
Excellent.

Alison Kay (58:48)
that was it. I remember now. So if you make it in advance, say you make your pudding on stir up Sunday and you’ve put some brandy in there or rum in there, it’s going to be cold when you come to serve it on Christmas day because you’ve been keeping it for five weeks. So then you need to actually re boil it or re steam it. And that has to be for a fair amount of time. That’s right. Yeah.

Francine (59:07)
Mmm.

That’s right, so I split up the total boiling time. So I boiled for five hours the first boil. Then because we have such hot Decembers, mine went in the back of my fridge. So it just sat there in the back of the fridge. And then when I served it, I boiled it up for another three hours.

Alison Kay (59:37)
Okay, so that is that boiling for three hours is literally to reheat it thoroughly. Is that right? Are you cooking it? Are you still cooking it at that point?

Francine (59:43)
I think it said for 8 hours and I just split the timing up. So it’s just really to reheat it, maybe to make sure that that suet has got nice and soft and everything’s fluffy again. That’s probably why the recipes say you reboil it for a couple of hours.

Alison Kay (59:48)
my gosh.

Yeah, I see.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I didn’t do that because we ate it and then I just put it in the fridge and then we had the rest the next day, leftover, cold. I remember when I was a kid, we used to have a large Christmas pudding and then I used to fry the leftover in butter in the pan and it was so delicious. So I’ve never done that re-steaming thing. The only way I’ve ever reheated it up.

Francine (1:00:12)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (1:00:36)
is by putting it in a pan with some butter and having it like that. Okay, yeah.

Francine (1:00:41)
I’ve used leftovers putting it under the grill, so toasting it under the grill and in the Eliza Acton, I think it was her 1875 edition, she has…

Alison Kay (1:00:46)
okay. Yep.

Yeah.

Francine (1:00:59)
I want to try this year if I have any leftover buttering a deep tart dish or a pudding mold and you slice the leftover pudding and line the pudding mold with these leftover pudding and you push it in nice and firm and then you pour in a really good custard and then you bake it

Alison Kay (1:01:02)
okay.

Mm. Mm.

That sounds nice. are also in Dorothy Hartley’s book, Foods of England, there’s some leftover recipes. Maybe we will be sharing those on the Discord forum when it gets closer to cooking up, which would be nice. Okay, let’s talk about ageing because that’s the question that Andrea asked me. Do I need to age it? Is it necessary? If so, for how long do I feed it? And what if I’m listening to this after Stirrup Sunday and it’s only a week till Christmas, can I still do it? Can you talk?

Francine (1:01:34)
Mm.

Alison Kay (1:01:52)
to those questions, please.

Francine (1:01:54)
In the last one, absolutely, just throw all the ingredients in, age it as long as you’ve got. As you said, you ate yours straight away, you didn’t hang it for five weeks. I didn’t feed mine last Christmas, I just left it in the fridge. I think the feeding with alcohol was…

Alison Kay (1:02:14)
Okay.

Francine (1:02:21)
more if you’re back in the day when you didn’t have a fridge or if you were wanting to have… there was quite often talks of having pudding, doing multiple puddings and it being a quick acceptable addition to a meal if unexpected guests came in. So if you’re keeping it past Christmas Day or doing multiple ones. But I don’t think aging is…

is as important to the taste as the time that you boil it. I think that has more influence on the taste than the ageing.

Alison Kay (1:02:57)
Okay, okay. feeding it is just if you want to, if you are aging and you want to feed it, is that just a matter of poking holes in the top and pouring alcohol in it?

Francine (1:03:11)
Why would a sheenist like a Christmas cake where you just take a little shot glass and just pour it over the top and let it seep in?

Alison Kay (1:03:13)
Yeah.

Okay, okay. I remember my mum used to do that with her Christmas cake, which was always very exciting. I went up into the spare bedroom and there was this Christmas cake under a tea towel every year and she used to feed it with little shot glasses of branding, I think. Okay, we’re getting close to time. So I just want to talk about the different recipes that you’ve investigated and what we made. You have done like an amazing

Francine (1:03:34)
Mmm.

Good.

Alison Kay (1:03:47)
comparison of 12 different recipes in a spreadsheet which we will put on the downloads page for patrons of the podcast to access and that’s basically a list of all of the 12 recipes that you detailed and then kind of cross comparing them so you can see okay this one uses this much fruit this one uses this type of fruit this one uses this flour this one uses that type of alcohol and so from that you can literally build your own Christmas pudding that will give you

an overview of the bones of it. I haven’t used that yet, but I will do in the future. I made a recipe from English Heritage, which is in the download, which I will link in the show notes. And we enjoyed it. It was egg free. Like I said, I used stout, had such a deep flavor. I used rice sourdough bread. I mean, I absolutely loved it. And Rob’s mum, who we were living with when I made it, loved it too. So, I mean, it was all thumbs up.

Francine (1:04:30)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (1:04:47)
Talk about the two that you’ve made, Francine.

Francine (1:04:52)
I did a modern and historical recipe last Christmas. I did one from a food blogger called Daring Gourmet and that was based on the Eliza Acton 1845 pudding and I hadn’t at that point I hadn’t really looked at historical puddings I just wanted something traditional and that that came out absolutely flawlessly and I liked her recipe because she she

Alison Kay (1:05:00)
Mm-hmm.

Francine (1:05:19)
gave you references to doing your own candied fruit. So if you didn’t want to buy store-bought candied fruit you could you could candy your own fruit. And then in July I did the 1802 plum pudding from the Art of Cookery by John Mollard and I chose that one because it was the earliest recognisable Christmas pudding that I could find.

Alison Kay (1:05:23)
wow.

Wow. And how did that taste compared to the Daring Gourmet recipe?

Francine (1:05:50)
I prefer, I would have, I liked it, but I would have used cloves and cinnamon and allspice, not just nutmeg. Yeah. And I didn’t, didn’t have, it says brandy, I was going to use rum, which I substituted for made.

Alison Kay (1:05:58)
Okay, that was the one with the spike with just the nutmeg. Okay, interesting.

Yeah.

Okay, okay so both of those recipes are in the download that’s available to all listeners. I’m just, is there anything else you want to add about ingredients or recipes or baking up before I bring it all together?

Francine (1:06:14)
Hmm.

No, I think that’s it. think with that spreadsheet it was, I just tried to get a snapshot of some really well-known cooks version of a Christmas pudding and then I was actually looking to see if there was a rationale that you had to follow or whether you could just free will within certain parameters.

Alison Kay (1:06:43)
Yeah.

Which I think, you know, in this section talking about making it, it’s been really clear that you’ve learnt from all of those different recipes and you see how you can really tailor it and make it your own, which is cool. Okay. Wonderful. Thank you ever so much, Francine, for your willingness to do all this research and to come on and talk about it with me. We will be talking about it even more.

Francine (1:06:58)
Mm.

You are welcome. Thank you for having me on. so much fun.

Alison Kay (1:07:17)
on Discord. So if you’re thinking about becoming a patron, now’s a good time to come join us and join us on Discord and let’s bake some Christmas puddings together for Christmas. We will be sharing on there. And if you’d like to see the recipes that we talk about and a lot of the history, you can get our download, which is on ancestralkitchenpodcast.com forward slash episodes forward slash downloads.

Okay, thank you again, Francine.

Francine (1:07:51)
Thank you, it’s been fun.

Alison Kay (1:07:54)
And yeah, here’s to, here’s to some really nice Christmas foodings. Thank you. Bye.

Francine (1:07:59)
Bye.

Alison Kay (00:00)
So Francine, how did you eat your Christmas puddings? What do you put with it?

Francine (00:05)
I generally just make a custard, a hot custard, or I’ll have ice cream or cream on the table. But in the past I’ve made toffee, like, yeah, toffee, hard toffee, and I’ve cracked it and put it in like flames coming out of it, and with sparklers. So…

Alison Kay (00:32)
wow, that’s the big deal. Gosh.

Francine (00:34)
Yeah so that’s that’s quite a fun way of serving it up. How do you have yours?

Alison Kay (00:39)
Wow. Well, not anything that spectacular. So traditionally, of course, many people serve their pudding by pouring brandy over the top of it to start with and then setting light to it and bringing it to the table like that. I’ve never done that. Although I think Gabriel would really like it. So maybe this Christmas I’m going to do that. And we just ate ours with cream, double cream or extra thick cream, like as luxurious cream as you can possibly find.

Francine (00:52)
Mmm.

Okay.

Mm.

Alison Kay (01:08)
But as a child, I’ve never had it with custard, which is why it’s interesting to hear your custard. As a child, we used to eat ours with brandy butter, which I think is a very traditional accompaniment for Christmas pudding in the UK, which is, what did you say? You told me earlier that it was, what was it called in the States?

Francine (01:12)
Okay.

I believe it’s known as hard sauce. So sweetened butter with alcohol in it, And… Mmm.

Alison Kay (01:29)
Hard sauce, okay, because it’s got hard alcohol. Yeah, yeah. So my dad used to make it with brandy and he made it with way too much brandy, as is my dad. And then of course that’s cold and you’ve got the Christmas pudding that’s hot. So you put the brandy butter on the top and it melts pretty much like ice cream. It’s all kind of around the bottom. And then just as a completely useless but quite amusing aside, my dad then used to put the brandy butter on his finger and feed it to our cat.

Francine (01:48)
Hmm

hahahaha

Alison Kay (01:59)
So then the cat… It’s just poor thing the cat would be slightly kind of tipsy in the afternoon. dear, anyway, that’s my dad for you. We don’t do that. We just eat ours with double cream.

Francine (02:05)
tipsy.

No.

You