A Cook's Notebook: Plum Pudding

From: Ali Berlow
Series: A Cook's Notebook
Length: 02:34

Good plum pudding is out there (and so is really bad plum pudding) Read the full description.

Piece Audio

Playing: A Cook's Notebook: Plum Pudding
From: Ali Berlow

Plumpud_small A Cook's Notebook - reflections on food and cooking in our kitchens and in our lives - airs weekly on WAMC Plum Pudding first aired in Dec. 2002 on WCAI PROMOS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST Accompanying recipes available at www.cooksnotebook.com

Also in the A Cook's Notebook series

A Cook's Notebook: Pork Loin Roast (02:24)
From: Ali Berlow

a sunday dinner

A Cook's Notebook: Salmon with a Pedicure (03:12)
From: Ali Berlow

the chef thought that it was just another lunch

A Cook's Notebook: Chocolate Bourbon Pound Cake (02:21)
From: Ali Berlow

birthday cake batter runs amok

A Cook's Notebook: Autographed Copy (03:16)
From: Ali Berlow

a chef, a fan, a cookbook signing

A Cook's Notebook: Oscar's Eggs (02:56)
From: Ali Berlow

11 year old Oscar loves his chickens

A Cook's Notebook: Coffee and Going Home (02:53)
From: Ali Berlow

you'd like to think that you've grown up when you go back home.

A Cook's Notebook: Fraud Pie (02:28)
From: Ali Berlow

and she thought it was homemade...

A Cook's Notebook: The Hungry Ghosts (03:20)
From: Ali Berlow

Buddhism and baking bread

A Cook's Notebook: Turkey Stuffing Paul's Way (03:11)
From: Ali Berlow

My father says I should make stuffing his way or no way.

A Cook's Notebook: Old Oil (03:03)
From: Ali Berlow

What do you do with the oil after you deep-fry a turkey? Bury it. On your neighbor's property.

Piece Description

A Cook's Notebook - reflections on food and cooking in our kitchens and in our lives - airs weekly on WAMC Plum Pudding first aired in Dec. 2002 on WCAI PROMOS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST Accompanying recipes available at www.cooksnotebook.com

Transcript

Call me unworldly but 226 years of independence from England and clever marketing campaigns have shaped my image of pudding as something soft and easy. We Americans associate it as a sweet and gentle dessert - an instant comfort food courtesy of the scientists at the Kraft Company. It?s usually topped with Cool Whip or found in the banana cream pie at the local diner. But every year around Christmas - Plum Pudding re-appears, befuddling our modern day notions of pudding and contributing to our holiday angst. Or, I should say - my holiday angst.

So plum pudding isn-t 'pudding' and it's not really fruitcake; and it also has nothing to do with plums anymore, but it does have something to do with Dickens. Whatever it is, many confused Yankee childhood taste buds like mine, were cut on it. My own bad plum pudding experiences provoke anxious memories of starched dresses, scratchy tights and...
Read the full transcript