A Christmas Pudding
I love, love, love setting things on fire. Not in a pyromaniac way (I can be trusted with matches) but in a supper club-in-the-1970s way. What on earth could possibly be more festive than a dessert lit aflame tableside to signal the grand finale? It’s the most TA-DAH thing humanly conceivable. Like Dolly Parton holding “I Will Always Love You” for the encore, you know it’s coming, I know it’s coming, we all know it’s coming, but I love it anyway. Why not close with a real belter?
Unglamorous, unstaged, unbothered.
But I also find sending things to the actual, literal ash heap very cleansing and freeing. When I got a letter I did not wish to receive many, many years ago, I burned it right up in the stainless steel sink in my dorm, scooped up the ashes, got out a fresh envelope, and mailed them right back to sender. I have never heard from her again, but I have made use of this technique several times subsequently. I strongly recommend it.
When moving out of my house this summer, I threw several “how to fix your marriage” books I had purchased in desperation straight into the fire pit in the yard. I breathed deeply as I watched each page curl up and disappear like so many of my efforts of 2021. Despite being dogged and openhearted and generous and brave, the lesson I learned this year is that you cannot set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. Lighting a book on fire also doesn’t keep you warm for very long, just so you know.
Is all this fire metaphor stuff corny? Is it unoriginal? Is it a little bit too on the nose? Yes, yes, and yes, but so am I. For chrissakes, I’m ripping off both Julie Powell and Nigella Lawson on one blog. I have no designs on reinventing the wheel. I’m just telling you what I find soothing, which is watching something burn itself out.
Today is my last first. A year ago today, I found out that the life I thought I had was a complete and total fabrication, that I fundamentally did not understand the world in which I lived. I remember almost nothing about anything from the 27th of December until about Memorial Day, but I truly do not remember January at all. I know there was a lot of crying. I remember sobbing in Trader Joe’s and a cashier giving me a plant. I have a vague recollection of spending New Year’s Eve sobbing in a doctor’s office. I am faintly aware there was a violent insurrection in Washington. I know for a fact my friend Haley came to see me, but I couldn’t tell you when or for how long. I don’t remember eating a single thing for weeks, but I do remember my physician prescribing me a sedative so I would sleep rather than keen.
This is all to say that I almost escaped 2020 relatively unscathed, and then God or the universe or some minor trickster from an obscure mythology was like, “ha, you dumb bitch. Watch this.”
So a year has elapsed since I found out my entire life was an off-off-off Broadway rendition of The Truman Show and I’ve had all my firsts. The first birthday. The first anniversary. The first night sleeping alone. The first time I didn’t know who to write down for my emergency contact. The first time I actually could not open a jar on my own. But there aren’t any more firsts. These are all now things I’ve done before and survived. And now I’m lighting something on fire to celebrate. A pudding, in fact.
When perusing the Nigella Christmas book, I discovered what she calls The Ultimate Christmas Pudding. I’ve never had a Christmas Pudding to compare it to, so I concur completely. It’s such a fussy, English thing but you break it up into parts over a few days and there’s something satisfying about someone asking you what the weird thing on your counter is and replying that it’s a pudding and then having a good laugh about how they call trucks lorries and elevators lifts and chips crisps.
Perhaps you notice a trend: it’s not gorgeous? It’s not even gorgeous in the cookbook.
I will be the first to admit I burned the shit out of this thing, but it’s honestly fine. I just scraped off the singed scab and went to town. I’m only mentioning it because it’s surprisingly easy to do. I’ve made a couple adjustments to her recipe but not a ton; her method is extremely sound and doesn’t involve anything you don’t already have.
I subdivided the ingredients into three groups so you can think about it in its stages, since it happens over a period of days. I hope that’s helpful for you; it was for me.
Lastly, don’t be scared of the fire! It’s so fun and it burns itself out quickly, plus you feel like a real badass.
Christmas Pudding
adapted from Nigella Christmas
Ingredients:
Part 1:
1/4 cup dried currants
1/2 cup raisins (I used a mix of golden and black)
1/2 cup chopped dried figs
1 cup chopped and pitted prunes
3/4 cup amontillado sherry
1/4 cup coffee brandy or Kaluha
1/2 cup fig brandy (if you have it, it’s fine if you don’t, bourbon works)
1/2 cup ruby port
Part II:
14 tablespoons frozen vegetable shortening, grated
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
2 1/3 cups fresh breadcrumbs (I made mine in the food processor day-of with a couple brioche buns that were a bit stale)
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
a nice grating of fresh nutmeg
zest of one Meyer lemon
3 eggs
1 medium green apple, cored, peeled, and grated
2 tablespoons honey (or maple syrup, if you wanted to)
Part Three:
1/4 cup cheap vodka (I used New Amsterdam)
Instructions:
Four or five days before you want to start this whole process, gather your first round of ingredients. Place each dried fruit into its own mason jar, then pour a liquor on top of it. I matched fig brandy and dried figs, the sherry with the prunes, the raisins with the coffee brandy, and the currants with the port. I recommend you do similar. Seal the jars and sit them somewhere cool and dark. Go about your life as you had previously.
Get out a 1.5 quart mixing bowl. I don’t know how I intuited which one that was, but somehow, I just knew based on what looked right. Grease it very, very well. Place a large pot of water onto the stove and set it to boil. Make sure the bowl fits nicely into the aperture.
Get all the ingredients in the second group and mix them together in the bowl of your stand mixer and beat on medium for about a minute, then add in the frozen Crisco shavings. Beat until it’s well-incorporated but not done to death (like, you should still see little fatty flecks here and there, but not chunks). Add in the steeped fruits you reserved, using a small spatula to get out ALL the liquor. Stir to combine, then press that entire mixture into the greased bowl you prepared.
Now we wrap the bowl. I recommend you do a tight layer of tin foil, then a layer of plastic wrap, then a layer of tin foil again. Make sure it’s watertight in any event, then place that bowl into the pan with the boiling water for five hours. Yes, five. Periodically, lift it out and maybe add more water in there; you don’t want to boil off the last of it like I did.
After five entire hours, remove from heat, unwrap it, then place a layer of parchment paper atop the pudding, then do the foil/plastic/foil thing again. You can lay this aside for up to a week in a cool area. Mine was just in the pantry.
On the day you want to serve the pudding, repeat what you did with the boiling water, but this time just for three hours. Again, make sure you check to make sure the water didn’t boil off in its entirety, as that is how I singed this poor thing. At the end of three hours, pull it off the heat and unmask it. It’ll be bubbly, so give it ten or fifteen minutes to bask in its own glory/let stand.
This is the part where you must be very brave. I got a cake stand and oven mitts for it. You’ll invert the bowl onto a platter of your choosing, give it a few taps, then pull up the bowl to reveal your pudding. Get out the part three ingredients (vodka), dump that atop the pudding, and light with a long match as everyone cheers for you and tells you what a genius you are. Serve with cinnamon whipped cream, or not. You decide.