Persimmon Pudding with Rum Pomegrenate Glaze

When one lives with a Henry (my super inquisitive, obnoxiously smart, nine year old) one is pushed into the far edges of culture and human experience. I know more, vicariously collecting knowledge through Henry's explorations, about jellyfish than any adult should. I thought I was fairly knowledgeable about Comic books... no. Not even close. I am now asked daily, in fact just now again from a little pajama clad Henry flitting around the living room in pajama bottoms, about my favorite X-man, Marvel, D.C. Nation, Pokemon...etc figures, and the normal ones just won't do. No, I am carried into the deep recesses of the archives of long dead heroes. The ones that only appeared in a couple of comics back in the 60's.

Holidays are not immune to his influence. Thanksgiving is now partially an exploration of early American and British exile culture. We can not make pumpkin pie. We must dig through the resources of fringe websites, and literary journals scouring site archives of sites like Old Sturbridge Village, looking for legitimate recipes that the early settlers did eat. And then, we must attempt to make those recipes. We must try to emulate a fireplace oven and find or simulate archaic cooking tools to make legitimate our efforts at Thanksgiving meal.

It really isn't as bad as all that.

Actually, its pretty fun. Hard sometimes, but definitely fun. Yesterday (and today's) effort was Persimmon Pudding. This isn't a pudding as we know it today. These puddings are from the mid 1700's and were popular among the British citizens both in the homeland and in the colonies. Earlier forms of these steamed puddings involved meat and some sort of grain for use as a binder. Sailors would boil their rations in this way much of time. Blood sausage and other "sausages" were made this way. Eventually, all of the blood... meat... and other savory things were phased out and what remains is the desert puddings. Even these are slowly being lost to the modern definition of pudding.

Steamed puddings are really super super moist breads that develop deep flavors through the carmelization of sugars in what amounts to hours of steaming.  They generally involve some sort of fruit and grain along with other preserved ingredients. This specific pudding also has those amazing Thanksgiving spices (cinnamon, ginger, cloves, etc) and has a spice cake quality. Like many old world deserts, it isn't overly sweet, so it benefits from some sort of glaze.

I used, and adapted a recipe that Henry and I found in the Old Sturbridge Village document archives. Here is the version that we came up with:

Pudding:
1 stick of butter
1 cup white sugar
4 ripe (These really need to be ripe. They should feel a bit like a water balloon) persimmons
1 Tbs Rum
2 eggs
2 teaspoons of baking soda
2 table spoons of hot water
1 cup of all purpose flour
1 capful of real vanilla extract
1 teaspoon of ground ginger
1 teaspoon of ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
1/2 a cup of walnuts
1 cup of dried cranberries

Glaze:
1/2 Tbs Butter (melted)
1 1/2 cups of confectioners' sugar
1 teaspoon of Rum
1 to 2 Tbs of milk

1 pomegranate (taken apart and juiced... reserve 1/2 cup of unbroken pips (those little red juicy guys))
1/4 cup of sugar

Directions

Cream the Butter and sugar in a stand mixer. Peel and seed the persimmons. This is a deceptively easy and messy task if your persimmons are truly ripe. Just cut the things in half and squeeze the pulp into a bowl. Pull out the seeds (they're about as big as Lima beans... so not easy to miss). Dump the pulp into a food processor and process until the fiber break down a bit. Just a few good pulses should do. In a bowl, lightly beat the eggs, combine with the pulp, rum, and the baking soda slurry (combine the warm water and the baking soda).  Add this to the creamed butter and sugar, alternating with the flour, while the mixer is running on medium slow. Let the mixer run for about five minutes or so. While it's mixing, in a bowl, combine the vanilla, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, walnuts and cranberries. After the mixer has run for five minutes, add the spice/nut mix to the bowl and run the mixer on slow just to combine it all.

So... I don't have a pudding mold. Nor, will I be buying one anytime soon. But, I did have a bundt cake  mold, which is almost like a pudding mold. The big deal here, is whatever you choose to use, it should have a hole in the middle. I don't think that the thing will set if you were to just try to boil it in a mixing bowl. So, bundt cake pan. Take the pan and butter the heck out of it. This is going to want to stick, so it really needs to be well buttered. Pudding molds have tops that clamp down tight so they can steam without taking on water. I decided to try just using tinfoil, and it seemed to work well. Butter a sheet of tinfoil just like the bundt cake pan. Poor the batter into the pan and then put the tinfoil on the top of the pan, making sure to get a really tight seal along the edge of the pan. The pan I used was one of those coated jobbies so things release easily, and it had a nice lip around the edge. I think I lucked out a couple of times there. The lip made it easy to really crimp the tinfoil around the edge, creating a nice seal. Find a big pot. Mine had to be really big... actually I used a lobster pot that we had down stairs. Put the bundt cake pan in the pot and then fill the big pot with water until it reaches half way up the sides of the bundt cake pan. I took special care here not to let the water get on the tinfoil... I don't know why, it just didn't seem like that would be a good thing.

Get the water boiling and immediately reduce it to a slow simmer. Put a cover on the big pot and simmer this thing for a full two hours. No lie... two hours. You might want to make sure periodically that the water hasn't evaporated. Mine didn't. I did have to make several adjustments throughout the steaming to maintain a slow simmer though. At the end, peel a bit of the tinfoil back (yes I did burn myself here, I was good about the tinfoil, but I didn't expect the steam inside the pudding mold to get me when I peeled the tinfoil back) and stick a skewer in. It should come out clean.

This next bit is tough. Reseal the tinfoil and somehow, get the the bundt cake pan out of the big pan... not gonna lie here... this was pretty hard. I ended up carefully using a couple of kitchen towels and quickly, got the edge of the thing and picked it up.

Take the tinfoil off and let the pan sit and cool for another hour. Make sure it isn't warm anymore when you attempt to take take it out. I took a plate and put it over the of the bundt cake pan and then inverted the whole thing. It just came right out nicely for me. When the pudding is nice and cool (I did this this morning) make the icing.

The icing is nice and easy. Combine the butter, vanilla, rum and 1 Tbs of milk. Mix it with a fork until it is combined. If you want it to be thinner, just keep adding a little bit of milk until it gets to the consistency you want. I actually made mine a bit too thin. Spoon it over the top of the pudding and let it run down the sides.

Take the pomegranate pips and crush them in between two mixing bowls fitted inside of each other. (see the picture). Press down and pour the juice out. Mix them up and press again, do this as many times as you can. Take the juice and in a small pot combine it with the sugar. Simmer it down until a stripe that you make with your finger stays on the back of a wooden spoon. It will seem a bit liquidy, but when you let it cool it will get syrupy. I let it cool till it reached about room temperature in another little mixing bowl. Put the reserved pomegranate pips along the top and sides of the pudding, and then drizzle the pomegranate syrup lightly along the top. Take care not to completely overrun the icing. I then took the excess syrup and poured some of it on the pomegranate pips on the outside edge of the pudding.

That's about it. I'll tell you how it tasted after tonight's Thanksgiving meal. Did I tell you that I love Thanksgiving? I love Thanksgiving.

db