Christmas Pudding (Gluten Free)

Today, I made the Christmas pudding. This made me feel like some 19th Century housewife, possibly Mrs. Cratchit. I gather, from reading I did as a child, that the Christmas pudding had to be made at least three weeks before Christmas, wrapped in muslin and stored in the cold store. In the 21st Century, we are going to London on Friday to see our daughter graduate from her master's program, so if I wanted to make this traditional dish, I had to get started early.
Christmas pudding is pretty much the same thing as plum pudding, which, by the way, does not contain plums.  It is a steamed, bread and dried fruit based pudding dating from medieval times. In the 18th Century, the British referred to raisins as "plums" which is why we talk about plum pudding.
The pudding has a religious affiliation, with a tradition saying it should be made the 25th Sunday after Trinity Sunday, and that it contains 13 ingredients representing Christ and the 12 apostles. The pudding should be stirred by every member of the family stirring from east to west to celebrate the direction the Magi went to get to the Christ Child.. For your information, Trinity Sunday is a movable feast that occurs anywhere from the middle of May to the middle of June. In 2013 it was May 26.
I am not going to take the calendar off the wall and count Sundays. Certainly, today is Tuesday, not Sunday, so we are not following the ancient rule in this house. Also this pudding has 15 ingredients, which could include The Father and the Holy Spirit, if we wanted to be theological about it.
Dishes with unusual ingredients start with a veritable pilgrimage around the city looking for said ingredients. Since I wanted the pudding to be gluten-free, I had to go to Giant Food in Chevy Chase to buy gluten free bread crumbs. Giant, or at least that Giant, has an excellent selection of gluten free products. Otherwise, in my opinion, it's virtually worthless as a grocery store.
Then, there was the suet. Wagshalls, on Massachusetts Avenue, opposite the American University Law School, has suet. I went there today, with my tires spitting through the wet snow. Wagshall's also has a choice selection of high-end meat and a lady butcher. My husband Bob wants us to have beef tenderloin for Christmas dinner. "Buy it at Wagshall's" he said.
Personally, I think there ought to be a law that if the customer may have to take out a loan to buy a food product, the store has a responsibility to tell the customer how much the food product costs. In this case, it was $33 a pound, more than crab meat. I handed my ATM card over in a somewhat stunned condition and drove home with the tenderloin and the suet.
After taking Watson, the puppy, to frolic in the snow and having lunch, I settled down to make the pudding. There is nothing difficult about it.The hardest part of making this is finding the suet. I suggest a farmer's market in your town, with a farm that sells grassfed, home butchered beef. You just basically throw in all the ingredients, mix them up and put them into a greased pudding basin or 22 ounce can and steam away.
This recipe makes a lot of Christmas pudding, three in fact. We are only having 12 people to dinner on Christmas, not an entire clan, so I cut the recipe in half and made one 1 1/2 pound pudding.
 Since the recipe says to put the basin or cans on a rack, it would probably be a good idea to do so. I don't have a rack that would fit in my stockpot, so I turned over a little baking dish and set the pudding basin on that.
When we get back from London on the 22nd, we will have our Christmas pudding in refrigerator, and we won't have to buy it at Heathrow!

Christmas Pudding

1 cup dark brown sugar
2 cups finely grated or ground beef kidney suet (This is also known as caul fat.)
1 cup soft bread crumbs (I used Aleia's Gluten Free Panko Crumbs, available at www.glutenfreepalace.com.)
1 cup currants
1 cup raisins
1 cup mixed candied fruit peels
1 cup finely chopped, peeled tart apple (like Granny Smiths)
2 cups flour (I used Bob's Red Mill Rice Flour to make it gluten free.)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
2 eggs lightly beaten
1 cup unsulphured molasses
1 tablespoon baking soda, dissolved in one cup boiling water

1.  Mix together the brown sugar, suet, crumbs, currants, raisins, peels, apple, flour, salt and spices.
2. Beat the eggs and molasses together and add to sweet mixture. Stir in the dissolved baking soda. Spoon into greased one-pound pudding basins or coffee cans. Cover with wax paper and then a cloth or aluminum foil. Set in a steamer or on a rack in a pan with boiling water extending two-thirds of the way up basins or cans.
3. Steam three hours. Cool. store in freezer or refrigerator. Steam to reheat, about forty-five minutes. Serve with hard sauce. Makes three one-pound puddings.

Indian Pudding (Gluten Free)

Indian pudding is an old New England recipe. When the early colonists landed here, they brought with them a fondness for a dish called hasty pudding, which was wheat flour boiled in water or milk until it thickened into porridge. But, alas, wheat did not grow very well in New England, so the colonists, learning from the Indians, used corn meal. They gradually began to add molasses, spices and milk as life and cuisine became more civilized.
This Indian pudding tastes a lot like pumpkin pie. After all, it has all the same spices. I made it for dinner yesterday evening when the young marrieds came to dinner. We had corned beef and cabbage as a salute to Saint Patrick's Day, and because everyone loves corned beef and cabbage. They really loved it. I was looking forward to corned beef sandwiches for lunch, but it was not to be. My son handed me the last scrap of meat, about the size of a slice of American cheese.
I reminded my son that we had made Indian pudding 27 years ago, when he was four. He didn't remember. I won't tell you what he said it looked like. Use your imagination about something a four year old boy would say. We had it with vanilla ice cream in the living room around what might well be the last fire of the season. We had tried to have a fire two weeks ago, at the creamed lobster dinner. It turned out, although we opened the damper we knew about, there was another one that the heat auditors had closed. Smoke spewed everywhere, and the guests had to retreat to the addition. This time, both dampers were open, and we sat around the fire talking and throwing logs on.
The only tricky thing about Indian pudding is putting the corn meal on gradually. You just want to float a teaspoon at a time on top of the boiling milk. If you put too much on at one time, corn meal clumps up. So sprinkle, stir, sprinkle, stir. Don't dump. Because my son asked to wait for dessert, ours was not as moist as it should have been, but it was still good. It is also possible that I let the corn meal mush thicken too much before I stopped cooking it. I cooked it until it was pulling away from the side of the pot.

Indian Pudding

4 cups milk
1 cup yellow corn meal
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/3 cup finely minced suet (I left this out. It makes food fatty and greasy tasting.)
1/2 cup sugar
2/3 cup light molasses
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon allspice
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
vanilla ice cream

1. Bring the milk to a boil, and add the corn meal gradually, beating vigorously with a wire whisk. When mixture starts to thicken, set it aside to cool.
2. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
3. When the mixture is nearly cool, stir in the remaining ingredients except the ice cream and mix well.
4. Pour into a buttered baking dish. Bake two hours. Serve piping hot, with vanilla ice cream on top. Makes ten to one dozen servings.