Carrot Pudding

Last night we drove to Salt Lake to celebrate my Dad's 77th birthday.

There are a few things in our family that are solid traditions, and one of them is Carrot Pudding. I'm not talking about that gloppy stuff that we American's call pudding. I'm talking about the steamed cakey stuff that the English call pudding.

This is an old family recipe that I remember eating for, well, as long as I can remember.

No, that's not technically true. I didn't like it much as a child. My kids and I have decided that Carrot Pudding is a mature taste that doesn't appeal to the tastebuds until about age 12.

So my oldest two love it. The youngest won't touch it.

Dad makes the carrot pudding (the recipe comes from his side of the family) every year. Mom made raisin cookies which are another sentimental favorite in my family. The younger kids ate Lofthouse cookies--the kind with 1/4 inch of frosting on them.

On the Carrot Pudding, we have a buttery sauce--either vanilla or brandy.

Now consider that we're Mormons. Mormons don't drink alcoholic beverages, but it's OK for us to cook with them. We get the flavor without the mind-numbing effects of the alcohol. That said, my parents keep a large bottle of very good brandy in the house solely for use in making the brandy sauce for Carrot Pudding once a year. Their last bottle lasted something like 20 years.

It used to be that they could readily find the ingredients they require for the pudding: It's grated carrots and potatoes, flour, Muscat raisins, REAL suet, some spices, sugar, etc. These days they have to special order the raisins from a company in California. Fortunately Muscat raisins are still used for making wines, so a few raisins are still available. And butcher shops don't keep real suet on hand anymore. The stuff they generally CALL suet is just ordinary fat made into pellets to feed to birds. But REAL suet is the fat from off the kidneys of the cow. It's a very fine-grained fat that melts nicely and evenly.

One last lost secret of the pudding is the cans they're steamed in. The original cans are tin, smooth-sided, and very old. They're just made from old food cans of some type--one very tall can about 5 inches in diameter and about 10 inches tall, with a second can of the same diamter cut to a length of about 3 inches that serves as a lid that's slid onto the top of the taller can. These are filled about 2/3 full with the batter and placed in simmering water to steam for three hours.

My Dad would like to be able to make more of them, but all the food cans available these days have ridges in the sides, making it very difficult to extract the puddings when they're done. You can find pudding molds on the internet for making this type of pudding, but they're quite pricey and, quite simply, don't have that same tradition attached to them.

Maybe we'll have to have some custom-made by a metalsmith.

At any rate, we all gave our blood sugars and cholesterol counts a not-so-healthy boost last night--but for tradition's sake, we were willing to sacrifice!