Week 48 – Clootie Dumpling

Part two of the Thank St Andrews It’s Christmas Day trilogy is a thoroughly Scottish bake. I had a few days off work this week so went down to visit my parents in Yorkshire and had a chance to bake with my mum again which was great. I started my usual tactic of searching online for something to bake when my mum suggested I could just look in some of her cookbooks, old-school huh! Well I am very glad I did because I found something really special.

My mum gave me her copy of the Glasgow Cookery Book to look through for inspiration. My mum was given the book in her home town of Glasgow and it has been well used and well loved for a long time. I won’t say the exact year she received it because I don’t want to reveal her age (she doesn’t look a day over 21!) but the book has her maiden name in it so she’s definitely had it for a year or two!  Whilst flicking through the book I came across a pile of loose recipes, two of which really caught my eye. The recipes were for the Scottish classic the Clootie Dumpling “A traditional dessert pudding,  clootie dumpling is made with flour, breadcrumbs, dried fruit (sultanas and currants), suet, sugar and spice with some milk to bind it, and sometimes golden syrup. Ingredients are mixed well into a dough, then wrapped up in a floured cloth, placed in a large pan of boiling water and simmered for a couple of hours before being lifted out and dried before the fire or in an oven. Recipes vary from region to region e.g. in North Fife and Dundee it is not common to use breadcrumbs but the use of treacle is common” (Thank you Wikipedia).

The first recipe I found was for a traditional steamed Clootie which was written out by hand by my mum, some years ago judging by the yellowness of the paper.  The second recipe was a more modern microwave Clootie recipe which had been written out by my Gran (my mum’s mum) along with a note about it. We think that my Gran had posted my mum the recipe around the time of mum’s birthday, because she always used to get a Clootie Dumpling instead of a birthday cake. The note read as follows:

“Was going to make you a dumpling but it was too heavy to send, so here’s the recipe. I have tried it a couple of times and it’s quite delicious really. The only snag is the fruit seems to go to the bottom, but it doesn’t spoil the taste”.

The cookbook and recipes

My mum and dad moved away from Glasgow over thirty years ago so the note could have been sent anytime after they moved and were too far away for Gran to deliver or post mum’s traditional birthday treat!!

So, what could be better for a Scottish baking week than a Scottish recipe, written and recommended by my Scottish Gran, found in the back of a Glasgow cookbook!! It is also gave me the chance to do something I haven’t done before in the baking challenge which is to bake using a microwave.

Ingredients (they were all written in imperial measures so I did some rough conversions to metric)

1 cup of water

1 cup of sugar

1/2lb (226grams) of margarine

3/4lb (340grams) sultanas and raisins

1 tablespoon of treacle

1 tablespoon of mixed spice

1/2lb (226grams) of plain flour

2 eggs

1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda

Method

1)      Melt water, sugar, margarine, fruit, treacle and mixed spice in a pan for 2 minutes. Add the four, egg and bicarbonate and combine together.

2)      Line a bowl or dish with Clingfilm

3)      Pour mixture into the lined bowl and cook in the microwave on high for 9 minutes (I cooked mine for an extra few minutes, probably about 13-14 in total because the bottom looked raw and runny. Baking in a microwave is tricky because food keeps on cooking after you stop heating it, so it’s hard to judge when it’s done. My dad told me that he thought, in his expert baking opinion, that the Clootie was a bit overcooked, I should have trusted Gran’s timings!)

The fruity mixture coming together

The dumpling in all its glory

I would have to say I agree with my Gran, it really was quite delicious. Being cooked in the microwave instead of the traditional steaming in a floured Clootie (Scottish word for cloth) made the dumpling a bit lighter and spongier than is traditional. My Gran was also correct, the fruit all sunk to the bottom of the dumpling but my official taste testers, my mum and dad, assured me that it was just as tasty (if a little drier) as a traditional one.

My dad considering his first mouthful!! What will the official taste tester think??

Sadly my Gran passed away earlier this year so I won’t have the chance to ask her about her recipe or tell her I have tried it out, but I think she was watching from somewhere and I hope she approved of me using her recipe!

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving, St Andrews Day and TSAICD this week. Now it’s time to channel the Christmas spirit and plan a Christmassy bake for the third part of the trilogy next week.

Happy baking, xx Linds xx