It’s Christmas Sunday. I’d never heard of Christmas Sunday before searching ‘what is the Sunday after Christmas called?’, but in hindsight, the name does feel slightly inevitable. As is today also being called The First Sunday of Christmas, or The Sunday After the Nativity. And just for good measure, it’s also St John the Evangelist’s Day.
While there are sticks and frosts and a lot of rueing going on today, I thought I would go with the age old tradition of doing something with the leftovers. While the new lockdown rules meant there was time to sensibly ration the savoury, the size of the sweet, as in the Christmas pudding, was too late to change.
So I thought I would make the Devonshire Rum Pudding found in Cattern Cakes and Lace which sounded much like a bread and butter pudding. But with Christmas pudding. And rum. Except I’d forgotten to buy more rum, so I made it with brandy.
I cut the leftover Christmas cake into slabs (the recipe said fingers, but I couldn’t quite see the point), and lined a pie dish. Then I made what turned out to be a very thin custard, pouring it over the pudding, before shoving it in the oven. The process was quick and painless.
After half an hour, everywhere smelled delightfully of custard and the pudding of the pudding came out. There’s a meme that’s very popular at the moment featuring two pictures, one entitled, ‘how it started’, the other, ‘how it’s going’, with the second picture invariably a less than fortunate rendering of the first one.
Well.
The custard hadn’t thickened in the oven, all it had done was break down the Christmas pudding to mush. A back of the throat stinging alcoholic mush. Not altogether unpalatable, but definitely a dog’s dinner to look at.
However, I did keep some of the Christmas pudding back just in case. And now that the risalamande has finished, I can go back to my usual post-Christmas Day breakfast of fried Christmas pudding. Although I imagine this made more sense when it was more of a blood pudding than a dessert. Still yummy though.
Resources
Jones, J. and Deer, B. (1987) Cattern Cakes and Lace, London, Dorling Kindersley Limited
Cooper, Q. and Sullivan, P. (1994) Maypoles, Martyrs & Mayhem: 366 Days of British Myths, Customs & Eccentricities, London, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
