Cook Your Own Adventure: British Holiday Favorites, Part 2
Nanna’s Christmas Pudding
It’s time for Nanna’s Christmas pudding! Not time to eat it, but time to make it so that it has a few weeks to “ripen” — in the cellar, larder, or if you want to be modern day about it, the fridge — and be full of flavor for the big day, December 25!
But won’t they go bad if I make them now and then eat them in three weeks, I hear you ask?! Oh ye of little faith. The copious amount of alcohol in this famed Christmas dish will ensure your pudding endures for years, should you choose to wait that long to eat it, but for best results, a shorter aging is recommended.
Plum pudding and Christmas pudding are one and the same and yet there are no plums in to be found in this delicacy. The confusion comes from “plums” being what Medieval Brits called raisins. Christmas pudding does, however, contain a good dose of patriarchal and historical tradition and an inordinate amount of work, as I discovered when I first picked up the mantel of making them from my nanna in 2018 and as documented for Bitch Magazine: The Patriarchy Is in the Pudding in 2019.
