The Christmas Pudding Event

Last year I decided to make real Christmas pudding. This was partly an experiment in whether I could make complicated things. And partly because I think Christmas rocks and should be celebrated, and celebrations are made more enjoyable by good food.

Consequently, I went out and bought a real pudding basin – not as easy as it sounds. It took me a while to find one. I also figured out where the two places were in Australia where you can buy real suet and obtained some (surprisingly inexpensively). I found a recipe by a person who is really committed to Christmas pudding. (No really, he is – he has very strong views on how the breadcrumbs in the recipe should be made and so forth; a company even sent him their pudding bowl to review on his website).
I negotiated the various options for keeping the pudding off the bottom of the saucepan for 8 hours while it cooked. (I disregarded the suggestion on the website involving hanging the pudding from a broom suspended by a coat hanger; there was just too much that could go terribly, terribly wrong with that, what with gravity and boiling water and all). I even worked out what on earth was going on with the ‘string handle’ and the pleated baking paper and foil combination that was meant to tie the entire thing together.

All in all, it was the kind of learning experience that Develops Character. And it didn’t taste too bad on the day, so it was all good.

This year I decided to repeat the experiment. We have no idea when the baby will be born, so I figured I could make Christmas pudding early, and if nothing else, we could at least have Christmas pudding on Christmas Day, unless we were otherwise occupied, as for instance may be the case if we were spending quality time at the delivery suite in the JR Hospital. But we would no doubt appreciate Christmas pudding in the wake of such an event in any case.

So, I set about making Christmas pudding in early-mid November. Here in England I thought it would be remarkably easy to make Christmas pudding according to this recipe. This is the country of pudding basins and suet after all.

The pudding basin wasn’t too hard to find. It was about 3 times more expensive than the one I found in Australia, but that is fairly normal for most things. The suet however was trickier.

I set off to find suet at the place which would obviously sell it: The Covered Markets. (which will get its own post fairly soon). There were four butchers there. One specializes in sausages: the most extraordinary array of sausages, many of them local recipes from around the country, and all of them looking like they have had more of an association with actual meat than the average sausage one encounters. Another sells all kinds of exotic things: pigeon, rabbit, pheasant, goat and so forth. The other two are slightly more prosaic and sell ordinary meat as well as a few more interesting things on the side. In all, one would imagine that between the four of them, something as uninteresting as beef suet would be easy to obtain.

None of them sold suet.

In fact, a couple of them never sell it; the others told me that they were getting it in for Christmas in a few weeks time.

There are two problems with that.

The first is that any self-respecting Christmas pudding cook knows that the Christmas pudding needs to be made early. I was making it in about mid-November, which is late (and I felt a slight sense of having let down the side by leaving it so late: what would other Christmas pudding cooks think of such a thing? Most committed to the whole Christmas pudding ideal would have it made in October, so that the taste can really develop). A few weeks before Christmas just doesn't cut it!

The second problem is far more ideological: this is England. I can understand the special circumstances of Australia, where the heat means that the regulations surrounding the obtaining and sale of suet are seriously restrictive, which means that few people actually sell it. But it really isn’t hot over here. And there are all these ‘English’ recipes which call for suet.

So, I went back down to the shops near where we live, thinking that the ‘Organic Butcher’ probably wouldn’t have it, but I’d give them a try before I resorted to fake suet (which just isn’t the same!) To my surprise they had it. They had ordered it in especially for a person who was also cooking Christmas pudding and they had stashes of it in the freezer. The butcher told me that it was becoming more a rarity in England as people didn’t use it much. As I reflected on this it made more sense: I am really beginning to get a sense that an awful lot of people here don’t cook or don’t know how to cook. (That at least would explain the spam fritters!)


The ingredients all lined up (the suet is front left; quite prosaic after all that effort!) The breadcrumbs are made according to the very strict and precise instructions on the website and are on the right hand side, for those who are concerned that all the instructions were followed precisely.

Thankfully buying the dried fruit and various other ingredients was reasonably easy, and the pudding is now made and ‘developing’ quietly in the cupboard.

The excellent thing about England of course, is the fantastic quality of the cream we can buy to go with the pudding. I’m sure at Christmas we can (finally) justify buying clotted cream… JMB