Proof of the pudding

Every family has traditions, created for a special occasion and maintained fairly faithfully thereafter. In ours, we have the great Christmas pudding week. We assemble it, then start cooking and, voila, some days later, we have a pudding. And soon we have the proof, too, with the smear of caramel and the crumb of dried fruit peel that are the remains of the day we started eating.

There is nothing, essentially, new about this. What is, is that we eat this pudding only three days after Christmas, to celebrate the birth of another male child, who grew up and, many years later, became my father. It seemed far more appropriate to cut into a rich, redolent, dark-as-Satan’s-mind melange of fruit, fat and flour than it did to slice up a wimpily sweet and airy-fairy heap called a ‘cake’. That we do on Christmas, though some years it has been caramel custard, kheer or even cookies to celebrate the coming of the Christ-child.

Officially, the making of the pudding begins on December 25. But preparations are made long before. In early December, we start with shopping. One of us heads out to the store, determined to stick to the list…a truly impossible task without huge doses of will power, especially when the shopper looks at all the various spices and dried fruit lined up on the shelves and wants to try everything with the vague idea that “Maybe that would go well in the pudding!”

But restraint and all, all the ingredients get slowly accumulated. Breadcrumbs are made, with leftover toast and many arguments about the virtue of white bread over the grainy, high-fibre browner versions that I prefer. Candied peel is chopped fine and soaked, along with sultanas and raisins and an occasional apricot or honey prune, in a slosh or four of brandy. Every day for a week at least this fragrantly alcoholic mix is turned and tasted, with a few more drops of brandy added, a little more nutmeg grated in, a couple of fresh raisins put in to replace the ones taken out for the taste tests.

On Christmas, in between the general cooking and the arguments about whether mithai would be better than chocolate pancakes with ice cream, the pudding is put together in the bowl in which it will steam for the next few days. Flour, eggs, breadcrumbs, spices, fat, the steeped fruit and a little more brandy are stirred together to make a thick, studded, aromatic batter that is alcoholic enough to make the cook stagger after a deep breath.

Then begins the cooking itself. The pudding bowl is placed in a deep pan, a modified bain marie, and set on the stovetop, where it will simmer over the next three days, a few hours every day, morning and evening, after I get home from work and before I leave in the morning. Every now and then the water level is adjusted and a little more brandy is poured in.

On THE DAY, the cooking continues until dinner time. Then the stove is turned off, the pudding allowed to sit for the half hour or so while we eat a light repast, which could be anything from toast to soup to salad to dahi-chawal to dal-roti-sabji, as it was this year. The table is cleared and the dessert plates and forks set out. The pudding is gently, lovingly, carefully unmoulded to the music of some interesting words when a raisin sticks to the bowl or the top doesn’t come off in one piece. And then it is carried out with ceremony, flamed with brandy, a wish made and generous slabs cut and served.

And then there is only the sound of forks clinking on glass and a spice-laden silence…