Imagine my horror, then, when I arrived to find that there was a sweet pastry mincemeat streusel<\/em> tart on the curriculum. And the county ladies at the table around me were anything but culinary amateurs. \u201cDid you get rid of that old Aga when you redesigned your kitchen?\u201d asked one. \u201cNo, I decided to have it reconditioned,\u201d her chum replied. Others were talking about the previous Betty\u2019s courses they\u2019d been on: fish cuisine, p\u00e2tisserie, baking with chocolate, breadmaking… \u201cI didn\u2019t dare tell them I used a bread-maker machine,\u201d said one. \u201cAnd they would only have fresh yeast… dried would have been like a swear word,\u201d giggled another middle-aged woman.<\/p>\n But the course tutor Paul Gray was a reassuringly down-to-earth Yorkshireman. His day job was as operations manager in Betty\u2019s bakery across the way but he had not forgotten how to do things on a smaller scale. He set out methodically the process of mixing the pudding. His ingredients had all been weighed out in advance, as had ours, in neat little plastic bags on the 18 workstations in the state-of-the-art demonstration kitchen.<\/p>\n \u201cYou get out what you put in,\u201d he began in what was to become the refrain of the day. \u201cThese are top quality Vostizza currants from Greece. You have to go for the best with every ingredient.\u201d There were sometimes a few little stalks in dried currants, one of the students ventured. \u201cGet them out,\u201d he retorted.<\/p>\n What if you hadn\u2019t remembered to soak all the dried fruit in brandy overnight. \u201cYou\u2019d probably get away with two hours,\u201d he replied. What if you didn\u2019t have two hours. \u201cThen make the pudding another day,\u201d he said shortly. Timing is of the essence if you have 1,500 vintage puddings to make by February and nearly 6,000 ordinary ones by August, as he did this year.<\/p>\n And he was not just precise about time. \u201cYou can use vegetable suet in the pudding but you have to use beef in a figgy pudding or you don\u2019t get the traditional flavour. . . When you use tin foil always put the shiny side to the food to reflect maximum heat back . . .\u00a0 Sterilise your jars for the mincemeat upside down in the oven.\u201d Why upside down, asked one bold enquirer. \u201cBecause that\u2019s how we\u2019ve always done it .\u201d \u00a0He was not being doctrinaire but simply passing on decades of experience.<\/p>\n On Christmas Day we would need to steam them again for another two hours. Couldn\u2019t we microwave them? It was as if someone had mentioned dried yeast. The other tutor, Amy Callin, intervened deftly and warned of microwave hot spots. But there seemed a touch of the puritan in Paul\u2019s insistence that steaming was needed to serve the pudding as moist as possible. \u201cI always microwave mine,\u201d said the students, furtively one to another, at the coffee break, exchanging guilty secrets. And yet the butter they ate with their fresh-baked croissants had, I noticed, been softened before it was served. The day was full of such little touches. Betty\u2019s is about buying little parcels of perfection.<\/p>\n After coffee Paul ran through the ingredients and method for the cake. \u201cWhere are the cake mixers,\u201d asked one lady. \u201cThis is your mixer,\u201d said Paul, holding up a wooden spoon. \u201cIt\u2019s important that you get a feel for this by hand before you can be let loose with a mixer.\u201d<\/p>\n I was to find out what he meant. I diligently followed his instructions. I checked the\u00a0thermometer inside the oven I was to share with Bridget, from York, who had done the course the year before and enjoyed it so much she was back for seconds. I massaged the lumps out of my brown sugar. I creamed the butter and sugar and added the beaten eggs in minute portions as instructed. \u201cBeat it till it looks like butter-cream before you add more egg,\u201d said Amy, looking over my shoulder.<\/p>\n But after the fifth splosh of egg I became over-emboldened and put too much in. The batter began to curdle. \u201cYou can beat it out or heat it out,\u201d Paul had said, but my beating arm had become weak with the effort. \u201cAdd a tablespoon of the floor,\u201d was Amy\u2019s tip and she took over the beating, with the vigour and precision of a Victorian school mistress. The mixture was rescued. My cake went into the oven alongside Bridget\u2019s.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/christmas-cookery-14a2.jpg\" "\\"christmas")
<\/a>After the mixing we put the puddings on to steam for five whole hours. It seemed an impossibly long time, but then the rest of the day was to be crammed with other tasks, from which we broke off periodically in response to Paul\u2019s cry \u201chave you topped up the water in your puddings?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>The day passed in a blur. After a lunch we moved onto making mincemeat, which is a much simpler business than I had supposed and yet which produces something immensely superior to mincemeat from the supermarket. Even the pastry which followed was relatively painless \u2013 apart from my plunging my hands in ice-cold water for five minutes \u2013 before I worked it. And Amy showed me a technique for rubbing the butter through the flour and nuts for the streusel<\/em> topping which minimised contact between my warming fingers and the fat. \u201cIt\u2019s like making p\u00e2te sucr\u00e9e<\/em>,\u201d I exclaimed. \u201cEh!\u201d chorused the other students. \u201cLess of the French, you\u2019re in Yorkshire now.\u201d<\/p>\n