Christmas Pudding - Mom and Grandma Ross

It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas in my flat, that's right it's Pudding Weekend.  You need to make your Christmas pudding at least a month in advance because it has to age, so that means now.  When my grandmother immigrated from Scotland to Canada she started making her Christmas puddings in canning jars. So for my sisters and I, the jar presentation is part of the tradition, passing those two-pint jars full of pudding around the table to help yourself to as much pudding as you think you can fit in the gaps of your stomach that aren't full of turkey and fixings.  What really crowned the dessert, for us, was the foamy white sauce we poured over the pudding, every year I almost expected a war to break out over the white sauce.

Last year I asked my sister Allana to interrogate both my Mom and our (Mom's) cousin Margaret for the recipe for pudding.  Allana craftily chose to ask when they were in the dozy stage of post Christmas dinner food coma, in front of a selection of other cousins for witness and peer pressure, in an attempt to get the truth out of the recipe saboteurs.  It didn't work so well, they kept mixing up the ingredients and amounts, not a straight answer out of either of them.

Mom emailed me her recipe which I then, as per usual, emailed back for corrections of glaring mistakes.  I've also supplemented the method instructions with a bit of internet research because the information I was given was very sparing.  Mom did say she normally doubles the recipe but I only made a fraction of the recipe because I didn't need to make enough for a family.  I'm not worried though, I've got an awful lot of pudding for a greedy girl to eat - mwah ha ha!

Mom's Christmas Pudding

Mix in a roomy bowl
1 cup grated carrots
1 cup grated apples
1 cup grated potato
1 cup raisins
1 cup currents
1/2 cup grated frozen butter (the original recipe says suet but Mom never used that)

One trick I found is to make piles of all the ingredients in the bowl so you can keep track of what you've added, once grated the apple looks like potato, raisins and currents might look a little too similar, separate piles keeps everything in order.

Mix in
1 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp black treacle (molasses)

Leave it all to sit for an hour or two, the liquid will come out of the grated ingredients and form a sugar syrup which will soak into the dried fruit plumping them up.

Then add to the wet ingredients and mix well
2 eggs

Sift together
1 1/4 cup flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp all spice
1/2 tsp salt  - but only if you used suet or unsalted butter (if you used salted butter don't add extra salt)

Mix your dry ingredients into the wet and fill your steaming vessel.

If you want to go our family style, fill canning jars to half full, put the canning lids on and pressure cook for 90 minutes at 10 pounds pressure.  The recipe makes 4 pints of pudding.

Or you can go traditional pudding style, butter either one large or several small pudding basins, fill with the mixture and cover with a layer of buttered parchment and foil in which you have folded a small pleat to allow for expansion, tie the paper on top and make a string handle and put into a roomy pot with a trivet inside it and steam for 3 hours.  If you use several small pudding basins still steam for the full 3 hours.  Check your water layer every 20 minutes or so and top up with boiling water from the kettle as needed.  After you've finished steaming leave to cool in the pot completely, change your parchment and foil lid after cooking for a fresh one exactly the same.

I went for a hybrid method, I don't own a pressure cooker but I did want my pudding in a canning jar.  I filled the jar and used a canning lid but steamed it for 3 hours.  I also had to form a very high hat out of foil for my pot as it wasn't anywhere near tall enough to hold my canning jar, and I didn't have a trivet to put my jar on so I used a pair of chopsticks.  Because I didn't use a pressure cooker I didn't expect the canning lid to seal but it did!

So my pudding is now sitting in a cool closet away from light and heat to mature.  Nothing to do now but wait, oh the waiting, it's like sweet torture.  One thing I'm sure of, I have the cook book with the recipe for the foamy white sauce in my possession, no foiling by the saboteurs on that one!

I started with around a quarter of the jar full of pudding and during the steaming it grew to half full, I probably could have got away with putting it in a pint jar but I wanted the big jar even if it wasn't going to be full to the top.