Plum pudding of a juicy kind

Pushpesh Pant

There are very few who still think of Christmas primarily as a festival of the Christian community. For almost 200 years, Indians of all faiths have treated this as a joyous occasion — a festival of their own — calling it the ‘Bada Din’ that merges in with ushering in the New Year. The feasting continues till mid-January in many parts of the country. The Christmas spread is lavish, with many regional delicacies — be it on Christmas eve or a leisurely brunch the ‘morning after’ that extends to late afternoon tea time. Wherever one may be celebrating Christmas, what is integral to it is special cakes and plum puddings. There are some who favour the cake with thick icing and decorations on top that recreate the Yuletide spirit — a mini Santa Claus sitting on a log with his bag of goodies and a tiny green twig suggesting the Christmas tree. But we have always been partial to the rich plum pudding. Personally, we find the cake too dense and cloyingly sweet. In times gone by, many friends baked Christmas cakes at home, each following treasured family recipes. These were exchanged and if the number of cakes to be shared was large, the cake batter was taken to a professional baker. This custom can be traced back to the middle of the 19th century when many Englishmen and Anglo-Indian Christians resided in the vicinity of Kashmiri Gate. Mrs Wheeler, who had ‘delivered’ as a mid-wife and worked as a nurse in the small hospital in the hill town where we lived, sent us a very delicious spicy cake at Christmas. But let’s return to the plum pudding.

For this short-cut eggless delight, spices are soaked in juice, not booze

The plum pudding, because it is steamed and not baked, feels much lighter in the mouth, though it is packed with ‘rich’ ingredients. It has a pretty long shelf-life, and even the crumbs are ‘to die for’. It reminds us of the nursery rhyme about little Jack Horner, who sat in a corner to put in his thumb to pull out a plum! Ironically, there are no plums, visible or invisible, in the classic plum pudding. There are raisins and candied peels in plenty and a whiff of the alcohol in which the spices have been soaked in for weeks. It also brings back recollection of other fruity cakes that were once very popular at tea time — Monginis, Palji’s and Britannia. Truth be told, we can never have enough of the stuff. We would like to eat the plum pudding all-year round. The only problem is that the preparatory work takes weeks, if not months, and requires some patience and expertise.It is only recently that we came across a short-cut recipe. Who cares that it produces an eggless pudding, it tastes quite close to the ‘real thing’ and those worried about the alcohol content may breathe easy because in this recipe, the spices are soaked not in booze but in orange juice.

Ingredients

• Mixed fruits & nuts 2 ½ cup
• (chopped, plus candied peels, tutti-frutti, if you like)
• Oranges for juice 2
• Sugar (brown) 1 ¼ cup
• Maida 1 cup
• Bread crumbs 1 cup
• Cloves 4
• Cinnamon 1½ inch piece
• Nutmeg 1
• Oil 1 tbsp
• Vanilla essence ½ tbsp
• Baking soda ½ tbsp
• Baking powder 1 tbsp
• Salt To taste
• Butter to grease the pudding mould

Method

• Place fruits and nuts in a bowl. Pour orange juice over these and cover. Let these soak for at least an hour at room temperature. Crush finely the cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg in a mortar and pestle. Keep aside.
• Put the maida, bread crumbs, salt, the cinnamon-cloves-nutmeg powder, baking powder and baking soda in a large bowl and mix together. Keep aside.
• Place the sugar in a pan, and put it on high flame. When the pan gets hot, reduce the flame to low. Wait till the sugar is dissolved, and switch off the flame — don’t cook the sugar for too long, otherwise it will turn hard. Immediately, pour ½ cup of room-temperature water into the sugar and mix well to obtain a dark-brown caramel syrup.
• Pour this syrup over the fruits and nuts soaked in orange juice. Add the oil and the vanilla essence to it.
• Mix well, ensuring that all the wet and dry ingredients are thoroughly incorporated. The batter should be thick, and not very runny.
• Grease a pudding mould with a little amount of butter. Pour the batter into the greased mould. Cover the mould with aluminium foil, and secure it with a piece of string.
• Take about 10 cups of water in a pressure cooker bottom. Bring the water to boil. Place the covered pudding mould with the batter into the water. Cover the pressure cooker with the lid (without whistle). Once steam passes, turn the flame down.
• Cook on low heat for 40-45 minutes. It is ready when a knife or toothpick inserted into the centre of the pudding comes out clean.