non-larousse cookery: christmas pudding

Been meaning to, for weeks now--well, months--get around to actually making my Christmas pudding. Had the fruit macerating in alcohol for a good while. Could have assembled this ages ago but didn't--largely because of the expense of the ingredients involved and, too, the time committment.

I've never made Christmas pudding before and was confused, I admit, by the myriad of recipes avaliable. Some looked Bad and were discounted straight away. Others looked good ... but very different from other good recipes. A friend picked up a recipe as an apprentice pastry chef and that's what I ended up using, although I scaled the quantities down considerably (well, by five).

Anyway, I used 2 kilograms of dried fruit. The recipe called for currants, sultanas, raisins, candied cherries and mixed peel. I used all of these but, too, some prunes, dates and figs. I macerated the fruit in a combination of cognac and stout (a big can of Guiness) for a few weeks. For good measure, last night, I added a splash of Irish whiskey. Mostly because whisk(e)y is as valid a choice for pudding as brandy. But too, partly because the decision to buy Black Bush rather than regular Bushmills was ill-advised.

Today I combined the above with 350 grams of suet (the real deal is hard to find but I'm told the 'suet mix' sold in supermarkets is okay--I guess we'll find out on Christmas day, right?), 200 grams of sugar (I used pure confectioner's sugar), 8 whole eggs (the recipe says size 55, which supposedly equates to the standard 'large' egg), 150 grams of treacle, 400 grams of breadcrumbs, 3 grams of ground allspice, 3 grams of ground cinnamon and 100 grams of self-raising flour.

I looked for a while--this was part of the delay--for small, cheap dariole moulds or large, cheap pudding basins. Neither existed. Sure. You can buy a dariole mould for two or three dollars a pop but, for the amount of pudding mixture I had, I'd need a lot of them. And I didn't fancy, not one fucking bit, messing around all day, rotating a half dozen dariole moulds. A solution presented itself earlier this week. Lincraft, a store that specialises in materials and etc, was selling calico pudding wraps of varying sizes. Three 90 x 90 cm wraps (turns out I only needed two) cost me just over $2 apiece.

As I write this, I'm beginning the process of boiling the two puddings--one small (for a given definition of small) and one large--for 4-5 hours. Then they'll need to hang somewhere for a couple of days.