Christmas Dinner – The Plum Pudding

Gran’s pudding bowl was a different shape but the pudding itself looked much the same as this pic.

The rich plum pudding flavour was guaranteed by having been cooked and aged several months before Christmas.  Plum puds don’t contain plums but do contain lots of spices, dried fruit, butter or suet, eggs, sugar, milk and flour.  They’re not hard to make, and there are lots of recipes around.  This recipe  sounds pretty good.  I haven’t made one for years, but I used to have several hanging up drying in the laundry each year by about September.

For us kids this highlight of Christmas dinner was the pudding, because of the silver pre-decimal threepence and sixpence coins that were put into the pudding before cooking, and we all knew that somewhere in there was a two shilling piece.  After lunch we had to turn them in in exchange for actual legal tender at the going rate, so they could  be reused next year.  Gran carefully served the pudding, doing her best to make sure that every portion contained a coin.   I don’t think think anyone in our family ever swallowed one of those little threepences, but Michael says that his own grandmother, Nanna Boutcher, always seemed to do so, because despite carefully controlled allocations of coins during serving, she always claimed she’d missed out, which might have been deliberate.  At Gran’s table, it took us a couple of years to work out that during the pudding course, Aunt Mary always seemed to swallow a coin.  She’d suddenly jump up from her chair, clutch her throat and, making choking sounds, would run from the room.  Gran or Joyce would run after her, leaving the rest of us sitting in the dining room, shocked and worried that she was choking.  It happened several years in a row, by which time none of us believed in Father Christmas any more, either.  It became her annual stunt, and we learned to wait for it.

After that large lunch, it was all hands to the washing up and clearing away before we assembled out in the garden for the annual family photo.  It had to be taken before we sat down to exchange presents, and it always seemed to take ages to get everyone in the same spot in the garden, arranged in some order and all looking to the camera at the same time.  For many years we Padman girls wore the identical pretty white hail spot muslin party dresses trimmed with blue ribbon that Mum made, always from the same pattern.  With generous hems and seams, they could be taken in and let out, taken up and let down as long as they held together.  Mum instilled in us that when having your photo taken you should pose without seeming to, with a relaxed open facial expression, and informally relaxed hands (never, ever holding a glass of anything) with feet carefully placed at a slight angle to each other, one foot slightly forward, heel tucked into the other instep.  We learned it well – the evidence is there, year after year!

At long last it was time for present giving, followed by afternoon tea, complete with mince pies and slices of Christmas cake.  When we left for home around 7pm we certainly needed no more feeding until the next morning, and there was still time that evening for another round of jam making.