Granny's Plum Pudding

          When does Christmas begin? It seems to begin earlier and earlier each year. A department store in Cork had its Christmas decorations up before Halloween this year!

When I was growing up Mum always made the mincemeat in late September when there were lots of apples around and it had matured enough by mid November to have some mince pies for my sister’s birthday, because she liked them and once her birthday was over we could start to get a little bit Christmassy. 

         The next thing we did was to make the Christmas puddings on “stir-up” Sunday, which is the Sunday before Advent Sunday. Then there was a lull until the tree and decorations went up in mid December about a week and a half before Christmas.

         The 8th of December was the official start of the Christmas shopping marathon. Nearly all the schools had the day off and everyone or so it seemed headed to Dublin to do their Christmas shopping. 

My Mother claimed that all the dubliners stayed away from the shops that day because of the crowds. She preferred to go into town on Christmas Eve with her sister just to enjoy the crowds on Henry’s Street!

The 1935 ingredients 

         This year I felt I should make a Christmas pudding not having done so for quite a few years. We have been very lucky to have been given puddings over the past Christmases and very delicious they were too, But this year I wanted a home made Granny Mahon Pudding.

I took out the black note book Granny had kept her notes in, she started it in 1932. 

         It has a note of all the marmalade and jam she made each year and how much it cost at the end of the year she totalled the pots/pounds up in 1940 she made an incredible 201¼ pounds! Well, there was a war on, she was cooking for seven people and bread and jam would have been a reliable filler up.

         She also kept a record of the Christmas cakes and Plum Puddings she made. The year that caught my eye was 1935, 80 years ago this year, she would have been a year older than I am now at the time. The 1935 pudding, she noted, weighed 14 pounds! That’s a stone or 11kg. 

         She didn’t use pudding basins or bowls to steam the pudding, her pudding was wrapped in a floured cloth and lowered into a large pot of boiling water where it remained on the boil for the next goodness knows how long, being topped up regularly with boiling water from the kettle. The kitchen must have been like a steam room with the walls streaming condensation.

        It would have been a marathon session each year!

My Mum was more up to date using 4 four pudding basins to cook the mixture in and instead of steaming up the kitchen all day she started the puddings off in pots on the hob and then placed them covered into the hot oven to get on with the process.

        Well, four puddings is more puddings than we’ll get through in the next five years. So I divided the recipe in four and I still ended up with two puddings that would serve six after a Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. One of the joys of leftover Christmas pudding is to fry it in butter for breakfast on boxing day.

         I tried to remain true to the recipe, but I failed to get Muscatels and Valencia raisins, these are large raisins with the seeds still in them, delicious as they are taking the seeds out is a fecky and sticky job. I replaced them with a similar weight of a mix of dried apricots, stoneless dates and dried figs cut into pieces. Muscatels and Valencias are available in good delicatessens and health food shops in November. I even went to my butcher to get proper beef suet. This is the fat that protects the kidneys in the animal. As he was reluctant to shred it for me I brought a piece home and froze it overnight before grating it in the food processor.

         Below is the recipe I used this year, I even made a wish as I stirred it!

This years ingredients

PLUM PUDDING 2015

115g/4oz sultanas

115g/4oz raisins

115g/4oz currants

75g/2½oz dried apricots chopped

75g/2½oz stoneless dates chopped

75g/2½oz dried figs chopped

55g/2oz mixed peel chopped

115g/4oz demerara sugar

¼tsp salt

200ml/7floz stout 

2  hens eggs

85g/3oz beef suet shredded or grated

115g/4oz breadcrumbs

30g/1oz ground almonds

115g/4oz self-raising flour

½tsp baking powder

½tsp mixed spice

In a large bowl mix together the dried fruit, peel, sugar, salt and 150ml/¼ pint of the stout and leave to soak overnight.

Ready for soaking

Butter two 900ml/1½ pint pudding basins and place a disc of buttered greaseproof paper in the bottom of each of the basins. Prepare the greaseproof and foil lids or a buttered disc of greaseproof to put between the pudding and plastic lid. Elastic bands are easier than string. Fill the kettle and bring to the boil. 

Add the eggs, suet, breadcrumbs and ground almonds to the soaked fruit and mix well.

Sift the together the flour, baking powder and mixed spice and fold through the other ingredients, if the mixture is dry add the rest of the stout. Stir three times clockwise and make a wish!* It should be a fairly thick.

Making a wish!

Spoon into the basins leaving a hollow in the centre and add coins wrapped in greaseproof paper and foil and push them under the surface.**

Adding the lucky money

Cover the basins with the greaseproof and foil or plastic lids and place them on trivets*** in deep roasting tin or oval roaster and pour in enough boiling water to come halfway up the basins.

Bring the water to the boil on the hob and cover tightly with a foil or lid and simmer for one and a half hours and then place in a hot oven at 130˚C, GM ½ for 8 hours.

Check occasionally and if the water level has dropped top up with more boiling water. 

Remove from the oven and take the basins out and let cool. If you used foil it needs to be replaced and retied.

Steam for another one and half hours before eating.

*optional ;)

** but not if you are reheating the pudding in a microwave!

*** a scone cutter makes a good trivet.

Short cuts! Steam in a slow cooker or pressure cooker, refer to manufacturers instructions.

Reheat in the microwave, turn out onto a plate and cut into slices, separate them slightly, cover with a bowl and microwave until hot through. Hide the wrapped coins before serving.

Note; If you are using greaseproof and foil to cover the pudding basins you have to put a “pleat” into them so that the pudding can expand during cooking. Tying the greaseproof and foil on is tricky! Use a rubber band to secure the greaseproof and then tie with string, the thick ones from a bunch of asparagus work well. This makes it easier to tie on the foil with string and make a string handle to lift out the pudding basin from the hot water. 

The pleat

The string handle

All in the cooking!

      Is there a cookbook you used in school for cookery classes? Do you still have it? Sadly I got rid of mine, it was a paperback and prone to falling apart, but I later found an early edition of it in a secondhand book shop and later again book 2.

      What I didn't realised was that it was a classic and has just been reprinted by O'Brien Press! 

      It is "All in the Cooking" written for Coláiste Mhuire  and approved by The City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee. It also became the cookery textbook for all Intermediate and Leaving cert students. Many of whom kept their copies and went on to use them in their homes.

      Hearing it was being reprinted I got out my copy and had a go at a couple of the recipes that I remember. We had a lot of plums at the time and one of the childhood desserts we I enjoyed was "Stewed Plums and Custard". 
      Partly for the fortune telling at the end when I counted up the stones.
I added a little spice to the plums and made the custard to the All in the Cooking Recipe.
It went down as well as I remember it.

          The second recipe I looked out was one for a 'cake' of Brown Soda Bread, 'cakes' of bread are round with a cross cut into the top of them and baked on a baking sheet. When broken into four quarters the individual quarters were known as a 'square' of bread in our house!

      These two brought back happy memories of watching in the kitchen as Delia, my Mum's wonderful kitchen help, made cakes of bread always pouring the last of the buttermilk onto her hand and smearing the top of the bread with it before cutting the three slashes to make the cross. Oh, happy days!

  

Who taught our mothers to cook?

And is still teaching us? Mary Berry! I've been looking at her new cookbook this week "Mary Berry Cooks" Published by  BBC Books. 

          While looking through it I was reminded that Mary Berry was one of the authors of The Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook (HACC), published in 1970 it appeared in our house sometime later that decade. There was a picture of every dish, in colour! As the name implies! I suspect a lot of people had this book, but haven't realised that Mary Berry of Great British Bake Off fame was one of the authors.

                Mary reminds me of a kind, motherly, but strict teacher of Home Economics. You don't mess in class and she will bring the best out in you as if you were her own child. Her recipes are straight forward and she isn't afraid to take short cuts, in particular her use of bought puff pastry.

While Mary has grown older and wiser her smile remains the same

      A recipe for chicken caught my eye in the new book, Peppered Tarragon Chicken.

 Was there one for it in the HACC book? Yes, there sort of is a similar recipe for Chicken with Orange & Tarragon.

         The older recipe contains frozen orange juice and sour cream and is made with chicken quarters. The new one uses black pepper cream cheese, chicken fillets and crème fraiche.
To compare the recipes is not fair, but there are really no new recipes. Just a reworking of ingredients.
There are new or now easier to get ingredients in Mary Berry Cooks, which she takes full advantage of.
           Every kitchen should have a Mary Berry book and this one is going to be well used in many households. A great gift for someone getting their first kitchen, it also has sections on menu planning and how much to cook and a section on how to use your freezer properly. Something lacking in many super cool, extra beautiful, I couldn't make that in a million years, chef's cookbooks!
           Eating real home cooked food is a joy and we should take our time to enjoy real food, so this Mother's Day lets do that. No matter how simple a meal, make it with love!

   

Finding a box of memories.

        When I was growing up in the kitchen drawer there was a knife known as "The knife"!
It had been a carbon steel dinner knife, but over the years it had been sharpened so much the blade had worn away to about 3 inches. It was very easy to sharpen and when just sharpened you could have shaved with it.
        I had forgotten about it until the other week when I was passing a local second hand shop. There were some boxes outside and one was marked everything '50c'! How could I resist a rummage? So I delved in and found an old carving fork, a carbon steel bread knife with the word "Bread" carved into the handle similar to one that we'd had at home, and then down at the bottom of the box I spotted a bone handle and a blade that looked very familiar. It was a "The knife"!
         Lots of memories came flooding back of home, learning to cook and the wonderful Delia who helped Mum and was always there too. 
         I brought the three pieces into the shop and happily handed over my €1.50.
I've given the three of them a good clean and now the have pride of place in my kitchen drawer.
                                           Did "The knife" sharpen up well? Yes!

"The Knife mark 2"

Being Busy

    The last week has been very busy. I've started a new part time job in February, so now as well as being a wife, Mum, recipe compiler and cookery teacher/demonstrator, I am now an assistant in a kitchenware shop. All these things do not mean I am in anyway less aware as to what is going on around me. Just that I have less time to comment on them.
  
     Sadly on Wednesday last we attended the funeral of a very dear friend who died suddenly on the previous weekend. A teacher for 40 years, producer of school plays & musicals, a leader of charity fund raising events and form master, he touched so many lives and so many returned that by turning up to pay their respects at his untimely demise. He was given the very best sendoff anyone could have ever had.
  
    The service was long like so many of his plays & musicals, but there was a role for everyone and it passed in a timeless manner. At one point I checked the time and found I was 30 minutes behind. An hour had passed and yet it was as nothing. Farewell to Gerry we will all miss you.