Day 43: Plum Pudding

We were baffled by this day: Plum Pudding, or Christmas Pudding, is very much a holiday treat. In November and December, you can find premade Plum Puddings at most grocery stores. In February, however, even dedicated British grocers do not carry it. So we had to make it. A recipe search turned up some super gross concoctions. The Joy of Cooking calls for suet, and treacle, and lots of other creepy things. Knowing that we probably couldn't (and secretly did not want to) locate those weird ingredients, we found a simplified recipe at Allrecipes.com. Plum Pudding does not actually contain plums, it's just what people in medieval England called raisins (dumb Dark-agers!).

Alex did a great job with this complicated-for-being-a-simplified-recipe recipe. We had to create our own self-rising flour (just found out that's pretty easy) and make some substitutions for things we definitely couldn't find (candied fruit peel). Then he had to combine all of the chopped, dried fruit with the flour, some butter, milk and spices and then STEAM the thing for TWO hours!

Many recipes stated that the Plum Pudding should be made up to a year ahead and then allowed to age. Ew. I guess this is Europe's version of the fruitcake, but it sounds pretty gross to me. We did not douse our Plum Pudding with Brandy and then light it on fire, as tradition calls for. We really should have. But we did serve it topped with whipped cream (no way we were making 'hard sauce' or whatever the eff that is).

This photo of Alex tasting the Plum Pudding sums our reaction up perfectly:

It wasn't...gross, but it wasn't...good. It tasted, to me, like gingerbread with strange fruit floating in it. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like if we aged this thing a year. Hmmm...There is space in our freezer. Maybe.