For someone who consumed candy as a food group, I always had a problem as a child in frosting and fudge being too sweet in literally gagging me. I do enjoy fudge, but it puzzles me my early reaction to things being very sweet.
Being poor, we never really had a great deal of Christmas things, and most of them were the result of later life acquisitions like krumkake things from junk stores to make Scandinavian things for Christmas.
Several years ago upon reading Col. Townsend Whelen's book on wilderness travel, he mentioned making a Plum Pudding on the trail for Christmas. Being ignorant of things, I knew I liked pudding, but decided I hated hot plums in a pudding, so dismissed it all long ago.......until reading how to make the impossible thing of A Christmas Carol.
In real English Plum Puds, you make the thing, put it into a floured sack and then boil it for like 3 hours. That sounds to me like a recipe for a disastrous pile of mush making me very upset.
In that, I have this attraction to pressure cooker pots, namely the old Prestos as they hiss and sing to delight the child in me. That Chris from America's test kitchen has a phobia about them, but besides from blowing a pressure weight off once when cooking a turkey in the pot being too full, the hissy pots have always behaved well enough for me, providing some attention.
It is in this that I have in a pile of cook books I purchased a little one from Preston for the Model 40. I like the 40's as they are sculpted pretty and my first pot came off of Ebay which I had to use an electric wire brush I believe to get the gunk off of it.
See a Presto uses a rubber gasket and stupid people for some reason leave it in the seal groove, which in turn gets all gelled up with meat glues and turns it into varnish which makes things not work right.
So any way, this cook book I purchased for a few pennies has the name Hazel Marie Davis from White City Kansas, nicely written on the cover. Hazel had very nice penmanship, but I surmise not very pleasant children or grandchildren in relatives as they cared not for her Model 40 cooker nor for her cook book, in both were junked probably after Hazel was planted under the Kansas turf.
Any how, in the book is a recipe for English Plum Pudding, which I sort of make as a tradition. It is not that I like the thing that much, but it is just that I can make the thing, it tastes like an English Christmas with a pile of whipped cream on top, and that in time is sort of a Christmas tradition to suffer through.
I will place the recipe here, as I have other pudding recipes sometime to follow, as those one can apparently bake and not boil which might be fool proof. If one is careful of the pressure cookers, they behave, but hot steam is something a Darwin candidate might audition their demise for.
I bought in the junk shop a container to cook this thing in, as is Christmasy and quite pretty in design, and as it fits, it is the device I use.
English Plum Pudding
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg well beaten
1/2 cup suet (beef fat) ground
1/3 cup milk
1/2 cup currants
1/2 cup raisins
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmet
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup walnuts chopped
5 cups water in cooker with rack
Cooking: Combine sugar, eggs and suet and mix until smooth. Add milk, currants and raisins.
Add dry ingredients and mix batter well.
Add nuts.
Turn into a buttered bowl or mould which will sit in the cooker.
Cover with aluminum foil or wax paper.
Place cover on cooker. Allow steam to flow through vent pipe for 20 minutes.
Place indicator weight on vent pipe and cook 50 minutes at cook or 15 pounds.
Remove from heat and allow stem to return to down position.
One always has to be careful not to blow all the water out, but it is fascinating to me how a bread stuck into a tropical environment will come out not a pile of goo.
It is probably why I like suffering though eating this English thing, as all English things are just so high octane cloves and nutmeg, that is all you can taste and to me I wonder what the point in it all is.
My return is I get to play with steam, get to play with a pot, get to play at cooking, and get to eat something, so as long as it is not something Biblically forbidden, I will figure my joy will offset the eating part.
Someday I might boil up a pud, if I have time and money, but for now it will be this odd little thing, that should now only last two settings with TL suffering through it too.
There is so much to be thankful for on Christmas.
agtG
