SC - The great Christmas pudding experiment. And quinces! [Partial OOP]

[Lurking Girl]

No shit, there I was, staring at several lumps of frozen fat and five 
fuzzy green astringent fruits.

My plan was fairly simple:  start the Christmas pudding, and while it was
steaming away all day, make contignac.  (And lasagne for dinner, but that
was not a Project.)

[OOP section]

I took up my mighty box grater and a lump of suet, and started
grating.  Unfortunately, the suet a) started breaking off and b)
melting in my hand, very very quickly.  Ensued an hour-long
clusterfsck that ended with various wounds in my fingers, grease
everywhere, and an extreme loss of temper, but a bunch of grated suet.
How does everyone else manage this problem?  I could feel the difference 
in consistency between stuff grated and stuff just chopped, but there 
must be some trick to it.  Can anyone advise?

My pudding recipe is from _Lobscouse and Spotted Dog_, which is a
cookbook of recipe recreations from the Napoleonic era.  (It's a
companion for Patrick O'Brian's seafaring novels.)  The rest of the
recipe was pretty straightforward; various candied and dried fruits,
though I couldn't find anything in the store called sultanas (I knew
they were raisinish, but since the Hell Atlantic dweebs had screwed up
our DSL again, I couldn't look 'em up in the Florilegium), almonds, 
breadcrumbs, etc.  Got it into a 6-cup Pyrex bowl, took a piece of muslin
and tied it over top as best as I could (there is no rim on the bowl), and
popped it into the pot with the boiling water.

[Period section]

Deep breath.  Now, the contignac.  I was following the recipe in Scully's
_Early French Cookery_.  Lost a fingernail in peeling the quinces.
Boiled them in wine until soft, okay fine.  Now, push through a strainer.

Welcome to Hell.

My strainer is a pretty fine mesh, and even a soft quince requires a
heck of a lot of effort to get through there.  I pushed, rubbed, and
snarled for as long as it took the goop reached room temperature, and
over half of it was still on the wrong side of the mesh.  As a test, I put
a big spoonful into the blender, but the consistency was definitely
different; it wouldn't do.

At this point, I checked on the pudding, and life got worse.  The
steam had poofed up the pudding cloth and the string had slipped right
off.  So I had to try and reach into a pot full of steam to get a wet
slippery string back on a wet slippery bowl.  Which I did.  And it
promptly popped off again.

By now I was ready to chuck the lot and go order pizza for the rest of
my life.  Happily, the caffeine kicked in about then and I had twin
inspirations: for the pudding, I used forks to maneuver the string
back into place, and then left them stuck in there to wedge it tight;
for the quince mess, I used a bigger hammer.  Er, strainer.  I got out
the colander (standard metal-bowl-with-holes-in-star-patterns issue)
and started pushing through THAT instead.  Much better!  The
consistency was not as fine, of course, but it was a vast improvement
over the test batch in the blender.  Do we have any notion of how
small the holes on a medieval strainer would have been?

Finally it was all through.  Now, Scully's recipe calls for cooking the
remaining wine and honey together until the honey was reduced by half, and
then putting the quince glop back in, but the translation from the 
Florilegium I'd printed out said to add the quinces and _then_ cook until
reduced by half.  Well, I'd strained the quinces back into the pot they'd
come from, which had the leftover wine, so that settled it.  I put in the
honey and stirred it up--but, several minutes later, wondered: how do you
tell when the _honey_ is reduced by half?  What if it's the quince glop
that's reducing?  This may be a dumb question, I'm not sure.

Since I couldn't tell, I commended the mess into the hands of whatever
power or saint was ignoring me anyways and let it boil a while.
Scully says it's supposed to be a candylike mass, but mine kept
looking like applesauce.  (Red, non chunky.)  After about 45 min., it
had still shown no change except that it was lower in the saucepan, so
I called it done and put it in a shallower pan to let cool.  Tastes
nice, but not terribly exciting, even though I dug up galingale and
used some of my precious Real Cinnamon from the pepperer's guild.
Consistency is rather like apple butter, but somewhat more heavy and
"meaty".  

Best moment of the day was when I was measuring out my Real Cinnamon
with painstaking care not to spill any (as opposed to shaking ynogh
spice in, which is my ususal tactic), and suddenly feeling really
medieval in my extreme care for this valuable substance.  Can't just
run up to Shop Rite and get more!

Then the pudding was done, and I burned my hand on the forks trying to
get it out of the pot.  Sigh.

Here endeth the saga.  Suggestions welcomed.

Vika
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