Something for the weekend
The Profs of the pudding… Peter Bayless, chef, author and BBC MasterChef 2006, meets the Lewes sisters whose passion for Christmas pudding has built a thriving cottage industry. Food Photographer by Jean-Luc Brouard
C
“
ome on son, it’s
your turn to stir the pudding.” This, I think, is the earliest recollection I have of my mother’s invitation for me to help her with the cooking. To be honest, it wasn’t really an invitation at all, it was more like a demand for me to add my five penny’th of elbow grease to the annual ritual of stirring the Christmas pudding. At this point, my sister, five years older than me, had already performed her part of the ritual, as had Grandpa who lived with us throughout my childhood. Dad always worked long hours as a chauffeur so he would have to add his turns to the pudding mix when he got home. Only then could it go into the basins, be covered, wrapped in cloth and steamed for five or six hours. In order to stir the pudding I had to stand on a wooden chair to reach the table top, grasp the long handle of the wooden spoon with both hands and begin the first of my thirteen turns of the heavy, sticky, alcohol-smelling mixture. I was told that the number thirteen represented Jesus and his twelve disciples. I don’t know, maybe it had more to do with the thirteen ingredients in the pudding or even the baker’s dozen, the same baker whose day-old bread had to be grated into crumbs for the pudding mix. Anyway, you always had to stir from east to west, the same direction from which the Three Wise Men came to Bethlehem. Silver thre’penny Joeys were hidden in the mix so that whoever found them when the pudding came to be eaten, provided they hadn’t cracked their teeth, would be assured of wealth, happiness and good fortune for the coming year.
At that time, the stirring of the pudding meant much more than a simple kitchen task, it was the portent of wondrous things to come. It may well have been two or three months before Christmas, but stirring the pudding meant that preparations for the absolute best time of year had begun in earnest. I don’t suppose there are many families left now that continue to observe the ritual Christmas pudding making. Not many, that is, except for sisters Clair May and Pip Shorter who I am bound to say make the very best Christmas puddings I have ever tasted — sorry Mum. It all started 22 years ago when, as a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Clair first cooked a Christmas pudding to the recipe from her domestic science teacher. It was called ‘last minute Christmas pudding’ because it didn’t have to be kept for months to mature before eating. Incredibly, that
recipe produced a pudding that was less dense than conventional puddings, moist, slightly crumbly, chunky, lighter in the mouth, more easily digestible and utterly delicious. Clair and Pip remember carrying huge baskets of ingredients all the way to school and returning home with their puddings.That first pudding became the crowning glory of her family’s Christmas dinner that year. So much so that Clair’s mother insisted that she make the Christmas puddings every year thereafter. Thus she began not only to make puddings for her family, but also for relatives and friends and always the response was the same — everyone who ate them proclaimed them the best Christmas puddings they’d ever eaten. “Even people who don’t like Christmas pudding love this one,” Pip explains. Over the years the recipe has been honed and improved, the
girls always seek out the very best of local, organic and free-range produce for their ingredients, to the point where they can now rightly claim that the current recipe really does belong to Clair Cooks. Understandably cagey about the exact recipe, Clair, and sister Pip, boasted that their eggs come from the freerange hens at Holmansbridge Farm, the suet is supplied by Lewes butcher, Frank Richards. An obliging local bakery saves up its day-old bread for them and they source their stout ale from Harveys Brewery and their apples are either from their mum’s apple trees or Kentish orchards. So now we are beginning to understand why their puddings taste so good. Clair and Pip start with the best local ingredients and mix them all together by hand on their kitchen table. The only additives they use are a liberal dose of love and a lot of good humour. They are, by the way, a right pair of gigglers, which is probably just as well because mixing Christmas pudding can be very hard work indeed. From producing the odd few dozen puddings that they gave away as corporate Christmas presents, last year they decided to really go for it and Clair targeted Bill’s Produce Stores to become their first retailer.Armed with one pudding in its festive wrapping and another already heated for a taster, Clair accosted proprietor Bill Collison in the street outside his Lewes store with the words: “We make the best Christmas puddings you’ve ever tasted — you really should be stocking them in your stores.” Feeling deflated like a naughty child and convinced that she’d made a hash of her pitch, she left the hot pudding behind and headed back home. No sooner indoors than the phone was ringing. “Hello is that Clair
November/December 2008
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