Steamed Pudding for Dark Days

The sun is not staying up for very long these days. If you roll out of bed in the middle of a Sunday morning, make it down to the cafe on the corner for brunch and then go for a walk to collect something for dinner, the sun will already be setting on your return home. It lurks about low on the horizon often not letting any light onto the street. You know that the sun is out somewhere, but it doesn't appear to be anywhere near Glasgow. Now and then it stings you, popping out from behind buildings. Still, it's not raining.

Before leaving the house, sleepy in bed, I decided it was a day to celebrate. After the delivery of a promising letter and following a few sad and tiring days, a restorative winter meal was necessary. I felt this would necessarily involve a piece of meat cooked for a number of hours and a steamed pudding.

Full of French toast, bacon and maple syrup J and I went in search for this piece of meat. I wanted a ham hock cooked with peas or beans. None of the local butchers were open, so we settled for the supermarket and the fattest, meatiest hunk they had. Arriving home in the dimming light (it was, after all, nearly 3 p.m.), I set to work on the soup and pudding. I had no idea what to do with the ham hock. One had never visited my kitchen before and I only had memories of finished dishes from my father's kitchen, nothing about the formative stages. J said to just throw it in boiling water. That seemed like such a British response to a piece of meat, especially one with a thick, fatty layer. Instead, I got out my witch's cauldron, and slowly seared the meat in a bit of olive oil, with a touch of sea salt (probably unnecessary in retrospect - the ham was salty enough) and a bunch of whole peppercorns. Onions, carrots and nearly forgotten fridge celery were added to the flavoured fat and oil. Once they had all gotten to know each other for a while I poured enough water in to cover the meat and threw in some bay leaves. I then tried to simmer is just enough to bob the vegetable bits up and down. Pretty much forgot about it at this point.

While the meat cooked, I started on the pudding. Not having grown up in Britain, I tend to regard steamed puddings as exotic spongy miracles. I made a golden syrup one last year and was amazed at how goop dumped into a bowl and then left in a pot of boiling water managed to make a delicious and moist cake. J does favour a syrup sponge, but with the (non-negotiable) addition of custard, I find it a bit too sweet. Instead, I thought I would experiment with a spiced apple version. To start I peeled, cored and sliced three Macintosh apples. I am never prepared for the nostalgia I feel as soon as I first scrape the peeler across one of these apples. The smell, different enough from all other apples, brings me immediately back to my mother's kitchen and schoolyard lunches. They are such humble and ubiquitous apples in Canada, I feel silly getting excited about them in Scotland, but I have rarely found a food that makes me so unexpectedly homesick. Plus I think they are lovely to cook with. The apple slices ended up in a saucepan with butter (always salted), brown sugar and a couple of star anise. I stirred them as little as possible to encourage the apples to keep their shape and caramelize as they saw fit. While they got on with it, I made a simple cake batter: equal measures of butter and brown sugar (3/4  of a cup), 2 eggs, some cinnamon, ground ginger and nutmeg, 1 cup of self-raising flour and 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour. I mixed this all up and got a batter that seemed to stiff, too much of a ball, so I thinned it with some milk until it was a bit looser, and clung to the bowl in thick ribbons. My wee white pudding bowl (just a glass bowl, really) came down from her shelf and the apples (minus the star anise) were heaped in the bottom and the batter spooned on top. It didn't look like enough: the bowl was only half full and my confidence was about the same. Nevertheless, foil was popped over the top and the whole thing was lowered into a pot of simmering water that stopped about halfway up the side of the pudding bowl. I took the mixing bowl with the remnants of the cake batter into the living room and licked it while watching Eastenders. I then took a nap.

By the time I woke up, the meat on the ham hock was falling off the bone and had made a lovely broth. A peek at the pudding revealed a full, brown cake just cresting the top of the bowl. This is the gift of winter food: you can go to sleep and wake up with the house smelling lovely and dinner almost ready. In the end, the broth was left for another day (but made a very fast dinner after work the next day with the handfuls of shredded ham taken off the bone and put back in with some split peas) and the pudding was taken to a gathering at L's to accompany his fantastic fish pie. After rounds of soft, creamy and smoky pie, mountains of peas and salad, homemade bread and constant red wine, we were ready for the pudding. J dashed to the shop for some more custard after I foolishly only brought one can. Both the pudding and the custard were warmed through and dished up into messy piles. The sponge was moist and scented and the addition of the whole wheat flour was unobtrusive but provided a bit of girth and depth. The apples had dissolved into sweet, saucy heaps. The custard made every bite light and lovely. We were warm and full and laughing and that can vanquish even the dimmest winter's day.

Comments

[M]

We are all going to get very fat this winter. I can't wait...