The Quest For a Better Christmas Pudding

Here is a great seasonal recipe, for Christmas pudding: Take almaundes blanched, grynde hem and draw hem up with water and wyne: quarter fygur, hole raisouns. cast perto powdour gyngur and hony clarified, seeth it well & salt it, and serve forth.

It’s a bit hard to read because it’s literally medieval. The recipe is from circa 1390, found in a British cookbook called Forme of Cury. It’s technically for a savory-sweet dish called fygey. But fygey was also known as plum pottage, which was the antecedent of plum pudding (or figgy pudding). Both are synonyms for Christmas pudding, that indelible—and sometimes inedible—symbol of Christmas cheer.

Besides its spelling, the recipe has stayed pretty much the same for the last 650 years. (Other than the elimination of meat, which happened under the House of Hanover.) Christmas pudding is the rare dish of which we know its precise extraction. According to Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food, “pottage”—ingredients stewed together in a pot—metamorphosed into “pudding” when an imaginative cook put stew into a bag and steamed it. The word “plum” was synecdoche; it referred to the whole category of dried fruit the same way “apple,” for the ancients, meant any fruit from a tree.

The ceremony of drenching a Christmas pudding in booze and lighting it on fire is positively pagan. Who doesn’t remember the thrilling scene in Dickens’ Christmas Carole, where the pudding is carried in, “blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas Holly stuck into the top” ?!

With all its gorgeous history, it’s easy to overlook what is equal parts enchanting and tragic about Christmas pudding: The recipe’s medieval nature risks losing it its admirers.

Tastes have lightened up since the middle ages. Yogurt is the sauce du jour. Sweets have less flour, more coconut, less sugar, more...green tea. Which puts the classic Christmas pudding—a heavy brown cake of stale bread, nuts, raisins, and beef fat—in an uncomfortable position. After tasting an especially stodgy one in San Francisco a few years ago, it occurred to me that the poor relic had to evolve or perish.

Then last year, Mona Talbott, a Canadian chef and alumnus of Chez Panisse, and her wife Kate Arding, the British founder of Culture Magazine—who are also the owners of Talbott & Arding, a cheese and prepared foods store precisely a block from my house in Hudson—arrived at Christmas with a small, redolent Christmas pudding in hand. Mona steamed it, doused it, lit it ablaze, and served slices of brown cake thickly spread with brandy butter. It was life-changing, and the most festive thing I’ve ever eaten—sweet, with a sweetness that seemed mostly to come from fruit. Rich, with a light puddingy texture that brought to mind recent years of various grain porridges—from savory oatmeal to the barley one at Grand Central’s Great Northern Food Hall. The citrus was lightly sour and refreshing. And the presentation was beautifully old fashioned, in a ceramic pudding bowl. It had been wrapped in cheesecloth with a sprig of holly, and a crock of brandy butter (fresh butter mixed with booze, orange zest, and orange juice).

This pudding’s original recipe is the work of 90-year-old Patricia Arding (Kate’s mother). Patricia was given the recipe when she was a young married woman. Kate only ever saw it in a dusty, butter spattered, clothbound hardback book full of recipes in her mother’s handwriting. It was retrieved annually on or around Stir-Up Sunday, the fifth Sunday before Christmas when, traditionally, Christmas puddings were made. The day’s name came from the Book Of Common Prayer: “Stir up, we beseech thee, oh Lord, the wills of thy faithful people…” Every family member would stir the batter for good luck in the coming year. Mona Talbott has been making Patricia Arding’s Christmas pudding en masse for commercial sale since Talbott & Arding opened, five years ago. She says she follows the recipe almost exactly, and her Hudson Valley and mail order clients come back each year.

But why, then, does the pudding taste so of the moment? Why is it so absent the heavy anachronism I noted in the last one I’d tasted before Talbott & Arding’s? It may be the quality of the ingredients. Mona Talbott explains: “We use organic fruit, organic almonds from California, ground in-house. We candy all the candied grapefruit peel ourselves. The breadcrumbs are all from the heels of our baguette.” The eggs come from Feather Ridge farm, twenty minutes south, and the suet from Kinderhook Farms, which has the highest animal welfare credentials of any animal-friendly farm. Mona says: “And Anna, the shepherd at Kinderhook, is very excited because she’s British, and we always give her a Christmas pudding.”

Talbott & Arding’s is steamed, then cooled, and then stored to cure for a few months. I got two this year (one to eat early to ensure it was as good as I remembered). It must be steamed over hot water for an hour, then it can be removed and lit on fire so it can, in Kate Arding’s words “do its northern lights thing.” Then it’s ready to be sliced and served. Some people have it with cream. Some people have it with custard. “But in the Arding household we ate it with brandy butter,” says Kate. She had a grandmother who never cooked. “Her one contribution to the culinary world was that she would appear at Christmas with brandy butter.” I tasted my first this year with Mona and Kate by my side. It was even better than last year’s.

“Isn’t that delicious?” murmured Kate. Mona nodded: “I think this is our best ever.”

Originally Appeared on Vogue