Just The Caffeine Talking

Culinary Notes

This is the weird time of the culinary year. This coming week I'm going to be canning summer tomatoes . . . and making a pudding for Christmas.

New England's late growing season means you get all the summer produce right about the time it starts getting too chilly to sit outside and enjoy it. Once the tomatoes are done, we may see some cabbage, and then it's the long slog of root vegetables from the farm share until nothing's growing at all.

France Excursion 2023 Part Four: Up and Away!

On Friday the 23rd we got up very very early, about 4:30 a.m., and bundled into the car for a drive up the Cher river to the little town of Francueil where we sat outside a deserted winery in the pre-dawn darkness. A few other cars pulled up nearby, and then the caravan of white trucks bearing the "France-Montgolfière" logo came tearing up, towing a trailer filled with a big basket, tanks of propane, and a big bundle of colorful nylon.

We were going ballooning!

The professionals inflated and released a little helium balloon, and watched its path in the light breeze as it floated off, and then we all piled into the trucks and drove off to the launch site. My guess is that they have a number of alternate takeoff points, based on which way the winds are blowing. With a balloon you don't have a lot of control over where you go, but you can pick where you're coming from. We drove some five or ten kilometers to the east and into a soccer field where two other balloons were already unpacked and inflating. They use gas-engine powered fans to fill the balloons with air, then heat it with propane burners until the balloon is upright.
Once the balloon was ready and we had our safety briefing ("Don't touch the fans, and when we land squat down and face away from the direction we're moving") eleven passengers clambered into the big basket, our pilot Fabien fired up the burners, and we took to the air!

Fabien used a light touch on the propane burner, keeping us quite low for the first part of the flight. Once we actually brushed the upper foliage of a tree. We were low enough to see a fox in one cow pasture below us. The sun rose just after we took off, and the golden dawn light made the landscape gorgeous.

Staying low meant our balloon was carried along by the breeze blowing down the valley of the river Cher. We could see some of the other balloons in the air that morning — I counted eight, others said ten — had gone higher and were veering off to the southwest.

The strategy paid off as we passed directly over the Chateau of Chenonceau, with a glorious view of the house and gardens lit by the rising sun. We began descending as we crossed the river, and touched down in a newly-cut hayfield. The farmer cutting hay paused in his work to come over and join us for a toast to the successful flight. The winery where our cars were parked was just a kilometer away.

It was still quite early, just past 8 a.m., when we got back to the car. Diane and I drove across the river to the town of Chenonceaux (the town has an x, the chateau doesn't). We found one cafe opening early and got ourselves some breakfast, then hung around in the parking lot until the chateau opened for the day.

Chenonceau is gorgeous, both from the ground and the air. It was a pleasure palace, built by Henri II for his mistress Diane de Poitiers, then claimed by his widow Catherine de Medici, who basically ran the country from there until her son Henri III was old enough to take over. The house was built on the foundations of a fortified mill, and has a long gallery section stretching right across the river Cher.

The gardens are typical French landscaping: lots of gravel and show those plants who's boss. There is a small modern English-style garden which to my taste is much more appealing. Also a hedge maze, and — for some unknown reason — a pair of classic old cars. Maybe they belonged to Catherine de Medici.

We spent the morning at Chenonceau and then drove north to the banks of the Loire, for a sumptous meal at the Chateau de Pray, another Michelin-starred restaurant and hotel in a 13th-century castle. I didn't keep a copy of the menu, but I know we started with a kind of vichysoisse with tiny clams (almost like a cold chowder), roasted artichoke, beef with a wonderful broth poured over it, goat cheese, and a kind of deconstructed strawberry shortcake for dessert. All quite delicious.

I have noticed some patterns in high-end cooking lately. I don't know if this is a long-term trend or just this year's fad. The chefs are definitely scaling back on the butter, cream, and lardons. Instead they're pushing a lot of umami with concentrated broths and reductions. Portions are quite modest, really. The focus is on flavor, not fullness. Diane actually lost weight on the trip — remember we were alternating fancy meals with long walks through castles and museums, often logging five miles a day.

After two hours at the table we finally finished, and drove just a kilometer or so down the river to Amboise, to visit the Chateau du Clos Luce, the final residence of Leonardo da Vinci. Unsurprisingly, the house is now a Da Vinci museum. Because all his artworks and original manuscripts are in the hands of much bigger and better-endowed museums, the Chateau du Clos Luce focuses on Leonardo's technology ideas, with constructed versions of some of the things he only doodled on paper. The house itself is pleasant, and the gardens are quite nice, but I can't say I learned anything I didn't already know about Leonardo da Vinci.

By that point we were both pretty tired — it was something like 14 hours since we woke up — so we drove back to Tours, had showers, and went to bed early. A great day in all.

France Excursion 2023 Part Three: Chambord, Ezia, and Magic

We got moving early on the 22nd. I got the car out of the underground garage, and we set out eastward on the Autoroute heading for Blois. From there we followed smaller roads to the great palace of Chambord. This was Francis I's personal dream house, and he poured treasure into the project — and then only got to live there about three months.

Chambord's position reflects some of Francis's geopolitical ambitions. He was pushing his claim to various Italian kingdoms, especially Milan, but other major powers in the area were trying to stop him. As is customary with Renaissance politics, they all switched sides and made temporary coalitions so that at any given time Francis might be allied with the Papal States or the Holy Roman Empire, or he might be fighting them. But all this activity in Italy made it useful for the King's center of government to be located south of the Loire, saving days of time for couriers from Italy. Also, in an era when wealth still equated more or less directly to food, putting the court right in the middle of France's breadbasket was good policy.

Anyway, the chateau itself is immense and fantastic. Here's a picture.

Inside, there's no attempt at consistency. Some of the rooms are fitted out as they might have been in Francis's day, others replicate Louis XIV's era, or the days of the exiled Polish King Stanislaus I, or the tenure of Marshal Saxe, or the last private owner, the Comte de Chambord.

That last figure is a bit obscure, but he's worth learning about. He was the last serious candidate for King of France. In the 1880s, after the fiasco of the Franco-Prussian War, the Royalists had a solid majority in the Assembly and finally managed to agree on a single candidate, the Bourbon Henri V, who used the title Comte de Chambord when he didn't want any snickering.  

Henri's moment had arrived. And then he blew it all by issuing a proclamation from the palace of Chambord stating that he would never accept the throne if France didn't go back to the old royal banner of white with lilies. The French — including most of the Royalists in the government — decided that the Comte de Chambord was a fool and they'd be better off sticking to the Third Republic. Henri went back home to Austria and France has remained a Republic ever since.

The guidebooks strongly insinuate that the cool double-spiral staircase in the center of the house was designed by Leonardo da Vinci, but they can't actually state it as fact because there's no record. Having climbed up and down it I can attest that it almost certainly was designed by Leonardo because he made the stair riser height inconveniently low to get the right curve of the spiral staircase. That seems very like him.

Having worked up a considerable appetite, we drove to the nearby village of Montlivault for a big fancy lunch at the Michelin-starred restaurant Ezia. It's a nice unpretentious place in a quiet little town. Here's our menu:

Wrasse (it's a fish) with artichoke and a basil cream sauce

Braised carrots with shellfish

Fish (I don't recall what kind) with eggplant

Smoked duck breast or Pigeon (Diane had the duck, I had the pigeon) with beets, rhubarb and juniper

Goat cheese mousse

Elderflower, cucumber, and gin sorbets

All excellent, and we paired them with local wines but I didn't note what we ordered.

Full and happy, we drove over to Blois, which has another famous chateau, but we ignored that completely. Instead we went across the square from the chateau to the Maison de Magie — a museum devoted to local boy Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, the famous stage magician and inventor.

Every thirty minutes, giant dragon heads emerge from the museum, but unfortunately my video is too large for me to embed here. So instead here's a link to someone else's video on YouTube.

Inside there's exhibits of stage illusions, three different theaters where magic acts perform, a collection of vintage posters, and lots of stuff about the life and career of M. Robert-Houdin.

Here is one illusion, featuring the disembodied head of Dr. Diane A. Kelly.

We drove back to Tours the slow way, following the Loire, and had a light dinner across the street from our hotel before tumbling into bed early. We were going to be getting up before dawn and wanted our sleep.

 

Christmas and Hanukkah Dinner!

One last food post about our magnificent December 25 dinner, and then I'll get back to serious talk about space aliens. This year, since Christmas and the final night of Hanukkah happened on the same day, we decided to do a really big holiday dinner. Both of our kids would be home, and we invited two sets of neighbors for a grand total of eight people around the table.

The old table is infinitely expandable, but the dining room isn't, so we had to move all the furniture from the living room to the dining room, and put the table in the bigger space. Fortunately, our sofa is out for reupholstering, so most of the things we had to move were easily portable. 

Diane started making some of the dishes two days before, and of course I had started our Christmas Pudding at the beginning of November. On Christmas Eve we followed my family's tradition of eating out — eminently practical because the last thing you want is a sink full of dishes on Christmas morning. 

The meal was set for 4:00 p.m., so we started cooking at 11. The cooking ended just as (after) the first guests arrived, and then we spent the next three and a half hours eating.

The menu:

Oyster Patties — Roast Chestnuts — Chocolate Maccabees

Crémant de Bourgogne

Potage Crécy — Homemade rolls

Cold Steamed Salmon — Green Beans

Vouvray

Amuse-Bouche (Mushroom Puffs)

Beef Rib Roast — Oven-Baked Latke

Bordeaux

Apple Pie — Christmas Pudding Flambé

Coffee

Overall, an excellent dinner, and we're going to be eating beef and salmon until Valentine's Day. The pudding was more crumbly than last year's version, so I will go back to a six-month pudding or maybe even put one down in January for Christmas 2023. We lit the menorah, talked at length about things, and parted on a cold night feeling content.

The Trip to Iceland, Day 6

My experience of travel to various places has taught me that one should always include a "slack day" in one's travel plans. There are a number of good reasons for having a day with few or no activities planned: you can re-visit someplace you really enjoyed, you can switch around if something is closed or too crowded, you have a cushion in case someone doesn't feel good or is simply too tired, and you've got a day to just hang out in another country. Sometimes that's the most enjoyable part of a trip.

Friday was our slack day. We got swabs stuck up our noses to make sure we'd be allowed to fly home, then got lunch at a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant on the waterfront. It was pretty good — in the same league as sush in Seattle, which was better than any I've had on the East Coast but not as good as in Japan. Evidently nose-swabbing gave us an appetite because we put away a lot of sushi, mostly salmon and tuna.

One aspect of "globalization" which has been consistently disappointing to me is the remarkable lack of culinary crossovers. Iceland is a country where people eat a lot of fish, sushi is a Japanese method of preparing fish, so why didn't I see any codfish sushi? Why don't the taco trucks in Philadelphia have cheesesteak tacos? Why don't po-boy places in New Orleans serve banh mi sandwiches?

I appreciate authenticity — but I'm also aware that most authentic cuisines are a mass of borrowing and hybridization. In this era of creeping global monoculture, it's odd that food lags behind. I think we're missing some potentially good dishes.

Anyway, the sushi was good. After lunch we got our swimsuits and drove down to the Nautholsvik Geothermal Beach, which is a public park at the south end of Reykjavik, just past the municipal airport and Reykjavik University (not to be confused with the University of Iceland, which is on the other side of the airport).

Like the much bigger, much fancier, and much more famous Blue Lagoon spa, Nautholsvik is not a natural geothermal spring. It's the hot water outflow from a geothermal heating system — which means the water temperature can be monitored and controlled to avoid boiling the patrons. Natural springs don't have thermostats.

Sir William Jackson Hooker described the "boiling springs" of Iceland in his day: "I rode, however, one morning, to the hot spring, where I found a tent pitched, and as many Icelandic women and girls as it could possibly hold, sheltering themselves in it from the weather. They had come with their linen, which was brought on horses from the town, to the hot spring, where all the clothes of the people, for many miles round, are washed. Some of them had a few little miserable potatoes, not so large as a full-sized walnut, which they were cooking in the spring for their dinner, and which they offered me. I had carried with me some eider-ducks' eggs, for the purpose of trying how long it would take to boil them hard, and I found they required ten minutes, whilst lying in a part of the water where the thermometer rose to 200°."

You get a sense of what a high-trust society Iceland has in places like the Nautholsvik locker room. There are no lockers, and certainly no locks. Just plastic baskets to stash your clothes — and keys, and wallet, and phone — in while you soak in the hot pool.

The water's about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, very pleasant on a day when the air temperature didn't get above 50. There is a sheltered cove with a sandy beach where crazy people like my science advisor can go and dip themselves in life-threatening cold seawater before retreating up the slope to the hot water of the pool. I didn't indulge in any such foolishness.

Perhaps it was an artifact of the time of day, mid-afternoon, but we were definitely in the "prime demographic" for the Nautholsvik geothermal pool — middle-aged and older adults. After we'd been there about an hour some teenagers arrived, but they were still in the minority when we left. Maybe teens don't feel as much of a need to soak their joints in hot water.

Relaxed almost to a comatose state, we showered off and then had dinner at what may be my favorite restaurant in Iceland: Islenski Barinn. It has local food like fish pie (more like a cross between shepherd's pie and chowder), dung-smoked salmon on brown bread, excellent crepes, and local beer. The decor looks unchanged since Iceland's independence, and it is considerably less expensive than Dill.

After some more strolling about, we finished up our last full day in Reykjavik with a glass of wine at one of the downtown hotels, and then to bed.

The Trip to Iceland, Day 4

After a breakfast in our room (scones and coffeemaker coffee) we crossed Austurvollur Square to the Settlement Museum, a branch of the Reykjavik City Museum. The museum occupies the basement of a building (a hotel, I think) and consists of the in-situ archaeological site of a Viking longhouse from the first settlement of the Reykjavik region.

It's fascinating to see. They can date it pretty precisely by the volcanic ash that settled in the walls as they were being built. In the intervening thousand years the street level has risen about 5 meters — but I was intrigued to see that the house is basically aligned with the modern street above.

The house itself looked almost exactly like the buildings Sir William described in Iceland a millennium later in 1809:

". . . the walls of these are extremely thick, especially at the base, formed of layers of stone and turf, not standing perpendicularly, but leaning a little inwards, and about seven or eight feet high; a sloping roof of turf, laid on birch boughs, makes the whole height of the buildings, which even thus does not reach above twelve or fourteen feet . . . both walls and floors are but seldom boarded: the sides are usually nothing but the black stone and turf, and the bottom only the bare ground. Generally, there are small openings, either in the walls or roof, by way of windows . . . A chimney, or rather an aperture for the emission of the smoke, usually made with a tub, is seen only in the best houses, in others the smoke is left to find its way out at the door, by which, also, the only air that they can possibly receive is admitted."

After that we walked eastward, up hill, to what can only be called the tourist neighborhood: full of souvenir shops, bars, the Punk Museum, and other operations designed to separate foreigners from money. One of them was a great shop selling handmade woollens, where Diane bought a lovely sweater so warm that it is almost impossible to wear indoors.

At the top of the hill is the Hallgrimskirk, the biggest church in Iceland. It's a nifty Gothic-Deco building that looms over the city and has become a national icon. Amusingly, one could fit the entire Cathedral building next door to our hotel, steeple and all, inside the nave of the Hallgrimskirk with plenty of spare room.

The best comparison I can make is to a very different building: Gaudi's Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona. Both are superb modernist churches which still call back to their religious heritage. Sagrada Familia is ornate and highly decorated, drawing on the many Gothic and Baroque churches of Spain. Hallgrimskirk is very plain and severe, from the austere tradition of Lutheran churches in Scandinavia.

And, yes, we visited the Icelandic Phallological Museum. The Penis Museum. Of course we did. What can one say about it? A reasonable collection of anatomical specimens — about what one would expect from a college biology department. A collection of snickering artworks and historical exhibits which I found rather scanty. No Roman penis amulets, no Japanese penis sculptures, no ithyphallic Egyptian statues of Osiris.

I have a strong suspicion that 90 percent of the people who visit the Phallological Museum simply take selfies in front of the entrance and don't bother paying to go in.

My science advisor did have a chat with the manager about some deficiencies in the collection — all their baculae (penis bones) were displayed upside down, with the smooth back end up and the tip with lots of fiddly bits at the bottom. Those fiddly bits are sometimes the only way to distinguish closely-related mammal species, but they look more phallic with the back end up.

We did not have penis-shaped waffles at the snack bar.

With the best of good will toward the people running the Museum, my summation is that unless you want to post some selfies of yourself grinning like a fool in front of a whale penis in a jar, give it a miss.

Then back to our hotel for a quick clean-up, and then off to Dill, Reykjavik's Michelin-starred restaurant featuring foods inspired by traditional Icelandic ingredients.

The thing about super-pricey hoity-toity restaurants like Dill is that . . . they're really good. One can chuckle at the relentless use of the word "sustainable" on the Web site of a joint that charges $150 a seat. One can raise an eyebrow at terms like "codfish foam" on the menu — but when some very talented people devote hours to the project of making a really good meal, that's what you're likely to get.

The menu for the evening was as follows:

First, a series of little amuse-bouches including smoked trout (cooked on a traditional Icelandic sheep-dung fire), a tiny bowl of super-concentrated vegetable broth, little cakes of dried wolffish, and an onion cake dotted with sweet carrot slices. We had champagne with that — from France but with a notable "mineral" flavor suited to Iceland.

Then a vegetable course of greens, fermented cabbage, a barley risotto, salt-baked beets, sol, and mushrooms. What's sol? A kind of seaweed, known as dulse in the British Isles. "In Iceland, also, it is very commonly eaten, but seldom in a fresh state," according to Sir William.

Next came the fish course, of cod foam with lumpfish roe on rye bread; and cod with mushrooms, seaweed, and birch. We were drinking white wine by this point, another French label which I carelessly didn't write down. The pairings were perfect, though.

And then the meat: some braised lamb (cooked for ten hours!) accompanied by a rutabaga puree. Also a slice of grilled lamb loin with black garlic and a dousing of consomme. These were paired with a red wine, and again I'm sorry I didn't note the labels because it was excellent (the restaurant Web site is very secretive about what wines they serve).

We finished that wine with a vegetable course of rutabaga with wasabi, and a kind of potato puree with berries.

Dessert was a roll cake, chocolate with pickled rhubarb, and a lemon thyme vinegar caramel. I had coffee with that course.

How obsessive are the chefs? I asked our waiter at one point: does the chef pick out appropriate dishware for each menu item? Or are the items inspired in part by the dishware? Oh, no. That wouldn't be obsessive enough. The chef works with local potters to create the right serving dishes for each food. That's attention to detail.

We paid up and walked (a bit unsteadily) back to our hotel. After sharing two bottles of wine and some champagne, my science advisor says she doesn't remember anything after leaving the restaurant until waking up the next morning. I can report that she didn't insult anyone along the way.

Next time: whales!

The Trip to Iceland, Day 1 (second part)

The ferry ride to Heimaey took about 20 minutes and was the quietest boat ride I've ever taken. We later discovered that the good ship Herjolfur is electric-powered, with a big recharging plug on the dock at Heimaey. It makes sense for a short-haul ship in a country with plentiful geothermal power and no local hydrocarbon fuel. (I'm willing to bet the ship has a diesel auxiliary power plant for longer voyages or emergencies.)

The approach to Heimaey is amazing: steep volcanic cliffs rising straight out of the sea, with a narrow entrance to the harbor. Sea birds nest in the cliffs and whirl around over the water. The whole island group is utterly fantastic-looking, like something off of an album cover or a fantasy novel.

Once ashore we dragged our bags to the Hotel Vestmannaeyjar and then went in search of lunch. Unfortunately, Sunday the 17th was Easter Sunday, and the Icelanders are pretty serious about their Easter observances. Only one place was open, a tourist-oriented bar & grill by the waterfront. The menu was mostly pub food — burgers and the like — with a few ostentatiously "exotic" items: whale steak, puffin, or reindeer burgers. The kind of thing you photograph with your cell phone and post to social media. "Check it out! I'm eating WHALE!"

I'll admit it: I had the reindeer burger. I can't really say what reindeer tastes like because the burger was loaded up with stuff like cheese and cranberry jam to offset the flavor. What I could taste was kind of halfway between lamb and beef.

And no, I have no qualms about eating Prancer. Reindeer aren't native to Iceland (nothing without feathers is, really). I'll let Sir William take it:

"These animals were first introduced into this country (according to Von Troil) in the year 1770, from Norway, by order of Governor Thodal. Ten out of thirteen died on the passage. The three remaining ones have done extremely well, and bred so fast, that at this time Count Tramp reckons that there are about five thousand head in the island. They are, however, quite useless to the natives, for no attempts have been made to domesticate them, nor can the inhabitants afford to buy powder and ball to enable them to kill then for provision."

Evidently the Icelanders have armed up since 1809, as I saw it on the menu a few other places.

Even though we'd been up for about 24 hours by that point, it was still afternoon (and afternoons go on a long time at that latitude in April), so we put on our walking shoes and went out in search of birds. The desk clerk at our hotel said he had spotted a puffin only the day before, so we headed for the cliffs at the west end of the island, about a mile away.

The landscape of Heimaey is phenomenal, with volcanic cliffs and old craters right next to the town. The town itself is . . . functional. Older buildings have corrugated iron roofs and siding (not a bad idea when occasionally flaming ash is in the forecast). Newer buildings are that boxy Scandinavian style which makes me think all their architects were big LEGO fans as children.

Eventually we reached the western cliffs, passing some replica medieval Icelandic houses along the way. We saw a gorgeous view across the water of more fantastic offshore rocks. Plenty of gulls, plenty of oystercatchers, plenty of terns, even a couple of pigeons and a wood duck, but not a puffin to be seen. Still, the scenery was great, and we spent an hour out there before plodding back to our hotel and collapsing into bed. Thirty-three hours awake is long enough.

Next time: The Volcano!

Happy Tricolor Day!

Today is Italian Tricolor Day. To celebrate, I prepared homemade pasta with red and green pesto:

Italy and Mexico are fortunate countries, in that their national colors match their cuisine. Making an Italian dish patriotic-looking is pig-easy. Just use some tomato sauce, some greenery, and some mozzarella. In other words, make some generic Italian food. Same for Mexico. Japan's flag also lends itself to patriotic dishes: a red plum on a bed of rice, and you've got a flag lunch. Spanish cooks in a patriotic mood can lean heavily on saffron and tomato.

Sadly, all the countries with blue flags are severely handicapped. Making patriotic American or French food means you have to rely heavily on uncooked blueberries, or cheat and use food coloring. And in Libya or Saudi Arabia I guess you just shut up and eat your spinach.

Anyway, both kinds of pesto were delicious.

 

Kitchen Report: Pudding!

This Christmas, we had a traditional English Christmas Pudding for dessert after our dinner. What's a Christmas Pudding? It's . . . well, it's a lot more akin to a fruitcake than anything most Americans would describe as "pudding." I'll try to generate some suspense in this 'blog post by not revealing how it tasted just yet.

I got the idea because my daughter made plans to visit us for the Christmas holiday season. She's not a huge fan of turkey, so my wife and I decided to cook a goose as the centerpiece of our meal. If you're making a Christmas Goose, the temptation to go Full Dickens and have a Christmas Pudding to follow is very strong, and I gave in. Plus I'm interested in food history and wanted to try it.

My recipe was from the extremely useful historical cookbook Lobscouse & Spotted Dog, by Grossman and Thomas. It's a solidly researched and fearlessly kitchen-tested companion to Patrick O'Brian's novels about Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin in the Royal Navy of Nelson's era. If you want to know how to cook a rat, this is the book to consult. Since Captain Aubrey is a huge fan of English pudding in all its forms, the book has thirty-odd different pudding recipes, ranging from "Figgy-Dowdy" to "Drowned Baby" to "Floating Islands."

A useful technique when trying an unfamiliar recipe, especially a historical one, is to find as many versions as possible and compare them. This gives one a sense of which ingredients are central to the dish, which are optional, and what the core techniques are for cooking. So I did some online research and consulted some of my other old cookbooks.

The core of a Christmas Pudding (aka a Plum Pudding because it contains raisins and the English don't know how to speak their own language) is a mix of beef suet, flour, sugar, breadcrumbs and eggs; packed with dried fruit, chopped nuts, and spices. And booze. The exact fruits and spices vary somewhat from one recipe to another.

Which was good, because getting hold of all of them was quite a chore, and some proved impossible to find. I had all the spices (cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, and clove), so that part was easy enough. Suet came from Sutter Meats in Northampton. Raisins, currants, and almonds were no problem. Candied orange peel had to be ordered via Amazon, and candied citron was simply unavailable to me. The fact that we were in the middle of a global supply chain crisis may have had something to do with that.

I began accumulating the Christmas Pudding ingredients in October, and actually prepared it in early November. This may seem like a long lead time, but Grossman and Thomas recommend getting your pudding ready a whole year in advance. Other recipes tended to center around six to eight weeks prior to serving, so I went with that.

The actual cooking is simple but time-consuming. You mix everything up together, put it in a pudding-basin (I used a metal bowl), and then steam it in boiling water for five hours. Extract it from the pot — my cookbook authors went into a certain amount of technical advice about getting the pudding out of the boiling water but I simply let it cool down before removing — and then store for two to twelve months. Give it a shot of booze every few weeks.

On the big day, heat it up with a couple of hours of steaming, then turn out onto a serving dish. Heat up a few ounces of brandy just to boiling, set it on fire, and pour the flaming liquid over the pudding. Because what dessert isn't improved by flaming brandy, really? Here's what it looked like.

So, I hear you ask, how is it? It's good. I liked it a lot — but then I'm also someone who loves mince pies and old-fashioned sangria. Raisins and cloves and citrus are a flavor combination I love in just about any form.

As one can see from this close-up view, the pudding is mostly fruit. The suet-flour-egg mixture is just a matrix to hold it all together. It goes very well with red wine, less so with champagne. We accompanied ours with vanilla ice cream, a combo I recommend.

It made a nice finish to a meal built around a roast goose. I suspect it would also go well with beef or game. Probably not a good Thanksgiving dessert — too much like the stuffing and cranberries anyway, plus everybody's expecting pie.  It's kosher, so you could have it for Hanukkah. Since I've got a quarter-pound of suet left over, I may make it again. Try it yourself — you've just about got enough time for next Christmas if you get cracking.

Christmas Menu

Menu for this year's Christmas dinner:

Oyster Patties    Cremant de Bourgogne

Cold Poached Salmon

Onion Soup    Sourdough Rolls

Roast Goose    Chateau Les Grands Sillons 2010

Chestnut Rice    Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Salad

Christmas Pudding    Apple Pie    Ice Cream

Overall it was quite delicious. The pudding will rate its own post soon. The only real flaw was that we planned this dinner for six people, but only three were available to eat it thanks to the Dread Virus. That means we're going to be eating leftovers for the rest of the year. 

Right now the goose skin is rendering for goose fat, the rest of the carcass is simmering for stock, and my son is passed out in a food coma upstairs.

Merry Christmas!