This weekend it is ‘stir-up Sunday’, the last Sunday before Advent begins and the traditional day for making Christmas pudding. This tradition dates back to Victorian times, and the name is inspired not only by the stirring of the cake batter, but the prayer ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’.

In Scotland, the traditional cake to be eaten on Christmas day is cloutie dumpling, a deliciously rich and fruity cake made for special occasions. Scottish baking extraordinaire Sue Lawrence has a fantastic cloutie dumpling recipe in her book New Scottish Baking.

Cloutie Dumpling by Sue Lawrence

‘She tried some ham and a bit of the dumpling, sugared and fine, that Mistress Melon had made. And everybody praised it, as well they might, and cried for more helpings, and more cups of tea, and there were scones and pancakes and soda-cakes and cakes made with honey that everybody ate.’

This is a description of the food at Chris Guthrie’s rural Aberdeenshire wedding, in the early twentieth century, from Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s wonderful novel Sunset Song. It shows the crucial part cloutie dumplings played at special occasions.

In my Dundee family, it was made on birthdays instead of cake. And served on Christmas Day. My auntie Muriel was the one, after my granny Anderson died, to make a cloutie dumpling for members of the family on their birthdays. When I asked her for the recipe, she always said she couldn’t possibly write it down, telling me there’s a ‘ticky of this and a ticky of that . . .’: no one ever wrote cloutie dumpling recipes down, they just made them. I managed to pin her down, however, and the following recipe is based more or less on the one my family used to enjoy, with some added extras, such as the black treacle, to give it a rich, dark flavour – and less flour to make it a little lighter.

Island bakers Netta MacDougall (from Mull) and Dolina Macdonald (from Tiree) both made such delicious cloutie dumplings for me I still remember them with nostalgia years later. Those – and the one made by Catriona McGillivray on Islay – are excellent not only as puddings but also sliced and spread thickly with some butter. Catriona makes dumplings for weddings and ceilidhs all over Islay.

‘Clout’ or ‘cloot’ is Scots for cloth, and it is after the word ‘cloth’ that this recipe is named, as it refers to the cloth in which the dumpling is boiled. Unlike any other dumplings or steamed puddings, it forms a characteristic ‘skin’, made by sprinkling flour and sugar over the cloth before filling with the mixture.

Beware clouties without skin, as they are not authentic. The skin must be dried off before serving and this is done nowadays in the oven. My mother’s task, as the youngest child, was to dry off the dumpling in front of the open fireplace. She would sit there on a stool for 15–20 minutes, turning the dumpling round and round until it was dried off and ready to eat.

Since it was made only for special occasions such as birthdays (in which case there were silver threepennies hidden inside, similar to charms in a Christmas pudding), this was a chore worth doing well. It would then be eaten with custard, but is now also served with cream or ice cream. Next day any leftovers would be served for breakfast: sliced and fried in rendered suet and eaten with bacon.

If you want to add coins, wrap 5 pence pieces or charms in waxed or greaseproof paper and add to the mixture.

Ingredients

Serves many!

200g self-raising flour
150g fresh brown breadcrumbs
200g suet, shredded
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp mixed spice
125g light muscovado sugar
300g mixed dried fruit (sultanas, currants, raisins)
pinch of salt
2 tbsp black treacle
300ml (approx.) whole milk
flour and caster sugar, to sprinkle on the clout

Method
Mix the first eight ingredients together in a bowl, then drizzle over the treacle. Add enough milk to give the correct consistency: you want it to be stiff yet dropping. Beat well together.

Dip a pudding cloth (or an extra large tea towel) into boiling water to scald, then drain well: I use rubber gloves to squeeze it dry. Lay it out flat on a board. Sprinkle with flour and then sugar (I use flour and sugar shakers): you want an even, but not thick, sprinkling. This forms the characteristic skin.

Now spoon the mixture into the middle of the cloth in a heap, then draw the corners of the cloth and tie up securely with string, allowing a little room for expansion. Place the cloutie on a heatproof plate in the bottom of a large saucepan. Top up with boiling water to just about cover the pudding (it must come at least three-quarters of the way
up the side), then cover with a lid and simmer gently for about 3–3½ hours, until it feels firm.

Check the water level regularly and top up, if necessary. You should hear the reassuring, gentle shuddering sound of the plate on the bottom of the pan for the entire duration of cooking. Towards the end, preheat the oven to 180°C.

Wearing rubber gloves, remove the pudding from the pan, dip briefly into a bowl of cold water (no more than 10 seconds) so the skin does not stick to the cloth. Cut the string, untie the cloth and invert the dumpling onto a warmed ovenproof plate.

Place in the preheated oven for 10–15 minutes to dry off the skin – it should feel a little less sticky when removed – then sprinkle with caster sugar and serve hot with custard.