Clootie Dumpling

This is a pudding for the shortest days. The windows fog up within the first hour of cooking, the kitchen smells of treacle and cinnamon and something darker, and the pot on the hob keeps up a low, steady mutter for most of the afternoon. Hogmanay is the traditional night for it, but any cold evening between Christmas and the end of January will do. It needs the weather. It needs a house that has been shut against the wind.

This isn't my tradition. I'm English and I learned the clootie from a Scottish friend years ago, who showed me how to scald the cloth and dust it with flour before it went anywhere near the dumpling, and who was firm about the skin being the whole point. She was right. That papery jacket, where the cloth pressed and the flour tightened in the boil, is what separates a clootie from any other steamed pudding. Without it, you've just made a wet Christmas pud.

The method takes time but almost no attention. You mix the batter, wrap it up, lower it into a pot of simmering water, and leave it alone for three and a half hours. The work is in the waiting, and in remembering to top the pot up with boiling water now and then so the dumpling stays covered. Everything else is the kitchen doing its quiet job while you get on with the rest of the day.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first time I made one. Cloth, string, patience, cream. That was the whole note and it's still about right.