Tag: 260604

Stripped down

Jon Pousette-Dart plays intimate Rex show

As he walked into Quadrafonic Sound Studio to begin his band’s first album in 1972, Jon Pousette-Dart heard the strains of another session. Curious, he looked in to find Dobie Gray finishing up his classic single “Drift Away,” with a stunning group of players behind him.

Awestruck, Pousette-Dart made a mental promise in that moment to someday record with them himself.

Four decades and change later, it happened. His solo album Talk gathered together guitarist Reggie Young, who plucked the delicate chords on Gray’s song, Kenny Malone on percussion, bass player Glen Worf, and Clayton Ivey on keyboards. “All these original Muscle Shoals guys,” Pousette-Dart recalled by phone recently. “It’s got a really nice feel.”

With a roots-fueled remake of his band’s late-’70s radio hit “Amnesia” and “Invisible,” a lively rocker co-written with John Oates, Talk is also his best solo album. “The Story of My Life,” a Nathan Meckel/Blue Miller ballad that deserves to be a wedding dance standard, is another of the disc’s gems.

Alas, it’s the 21st century, where great records are born and disappear on the regular. As much as he enjoyed making Talk, Pousette-Dart wishes more people had heard the album when it came out 11 years ago. But industry economics got in the way, along with a streaming algorithm that punishes long players.

“I put a lot of work into it, and it was just typical with the way things are … it just sailed by,” he lamented. “Because the whole delivery system of records has really changed, you know?” He’s not surprised; after all, he named his 2002 album Sample This as a dare to the music business when it began to implode.

“There was an awful lot of stuff going on [at the time] that was kind of turning my stomach, so I made light of it,” he said.

So he’s adapted, releasing new music song by song. His most recent single is 2024’s “Cry No More,” with its virtual flip side, the NRBQ nugget “Only You.” His next one, “Gone,” is due soon. “It’s about the universal loss that so many people are going through right now in the world,” Pousette-Dart said.

“Gone” will have a music video, something he’s done since a film made with “Who I Am” went viral. That song, written with Dawn Young (Pousette-Dart’s wife) and singer/songwriter Jaime Kyle, addressed Young’s mother’s journey through Alzheimer’s. “That’s been in film festivals all over the world,” he said. “Because it just hits home to so many people.”

One thing he hasn’t grown weary of or cynical about is performing live. In its heyday, his eponymous band was a touring force, and since its dissolution in the 1980s Pousette-Dart has continued to play the songs that inhabited Boston radio and points beyond, like “Harder,” “What Can I Say” and “There’s Been a Mistake.”

At an upcoming show in Manchester he’ll be joined by longtime accompanist Jim Chapdelaine, who has an interesting backstory of his own. A true multi-hyphenate, Chapdelaine is an Emmy-winning composer and a producer. He’s worked with Paula Cole and Delbert McClinton, and mastered projects for Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen.

They met at the Harvard Coop record store in Cambridge when both were starting out; Chapdelaine worked there, and Pousette-Dart had a deal with the store’s record buyer to trade in his used albums for new ones (side note: absolutely no one called them “vinyls” back then).

“He started a band called Mr. Right and got signed to Epic, so we were bouncing around at the same time,” Pousette-Dart recalled. “We reconnected many years later when he was playing with a friend of mine at a function. I really liked him, so I asked if he wanted to come out with the band … that’s how it started.”

Twenty-five years on, they have an easy rapport as they glide through Pousette-Dart’s catalog in a format that delights them both.

“You’re taking the songs back to where they begin … it always starts with an intimate, voice guitar setting, and that’s when you really know you have a song or you don’t,” Pousette-Dart said. “You can’t produce something into being a good song … it’s got to have it from the heart and soul.”

Jon Pousette-Dart Duo
When: Friday, June 5, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $40, palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/06/04

• Summer songs: A season of weekend music kicks off with Katie Dobbins, an inspirational singer-songwriter who also organizes the Hermit Woods Winery regional showcases. The summer series at a family farm’s outdoor beer garden welcomes solo acts like Amanda McCarthy (June 11), Dan Fallon (June 18), and Dakota Smart (June 26) Thursday through Sunday all month. Thursday, June 4, at 5:30 p.m., Beans & Greens Farm, 245 Intervale Road, Gilford, beansandgreensfarm.com.

• Metallic KO: For those who like their sounds on the heavier side, Martial Law tops a five-band underground metal bill. The Nashua-based groove metal band, fronted by bullhorn belter Brandon Benson, released the aggressively-minded EP A Means to Control a few years back. Rounding out the relentless night of rock are Art of Aggression, Overtime Fightcore, Fallen Monarch and Vauli. Friday, June 5, at 7 p.m., Jewel Music Venue, 61 Canal St., Manchester, $15, ticketleap.com.

• Musical kings: One of the area’s better-known Elvis impersonators stretches out for the Legends Tribute, an evening of country-leaning music from Johnny Cash, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison and Neil Diamond along with the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Robert Black is a Rhode Island-based singer who also possesses Presley’s distinctive Comeback Show sideburns. Saturday, June 6, at 6 p.m., Fulchino Vineyard, 187 Pine Hill Road, Hollis, $29, fulchinovineyard.com.

• Get psyched: Sounds from the galactic zone take the spotlight at Souls of Psychedelic Rock. Four local bands perform, including The Whole Loaf, Vales End, The Cherry Fog and Lee & Dr. G. The latter is guitarist Lee Durham teaming up with Louisiana-born Brandon Gauthier, who fell in love with a 100-watt Fender amp as a teenager and has kept it turned up since. Saturday, June 6, 7 p.m., Terminus Underground, 134 Haines St., Nashua, $15, newhampshireunderground.org.

Like an 8-hour movie

A look at some TV with movie ties

With The Mandalorian and Grogu putting TV in movie theaters, let’s look at some movie-flavored TV.

The Other Bennet Sister is currently in the final third of its 10-episode run on streaming service BritBox. Whether you’re a fan of the Jennifer Ehle-Colin Firth 1995 Pride and Prejudice BBC miniseries or the Keira Knightley-Matthew Macfadyen 2005 Pride & Prejudice movie, this sequel/sidequel miniseries based on the book by Janice Hadlow is worth a $10.99 one-month BritBox subscription. (The 1995 miniseries is available on Britbox and Peacock; 2005 is available for rent or purchase.) In Jane Austen’s book, Mary was the spinster-in-training sister of the five Bennet girls. Here, the action for Mary (Ella Bruccoleri) really begins after the death of her father. Mary heads to London to serve as governess for her uncle, Mr. Gardner (Richard Coyle), and aunt, Mrs. Gardner (Indira Varma), and she’s introduced to a new circle of family friends.

One of those friends, Thomas Hayward (Dónal Finn), seems as nerdily smitten with Mary as she is with him but he unfortunately has a preexisting “understanding” with the kind Ann Baxter (Varada Sethu). While Mary breaks out of her shell, she still sometimes finds herself trapped in her “the awkward one” persona, especially when she runs into Caroline Bingley (Tanya Reynolds), one-time Lizzy-competitor for Mr. Darcy’s affections. Caroline pours on the mean girl when she realizes that Mr. Ryder (Laurie Davidson), the new fella she has her eye on, has his eye on Mary.

This TV show very much catches the tone of both book-Austen and the beloved BBC series. Bruccoleri, who I probably only knew from her role in Call the Midwife, does a good job of selling both Mary’s initial awkwardness as the quiet one in a family of bigger personalities, and the character’s hero’s journey through the marriage market.

Want more of Mary’s cutie Dónal Finn? Catch him on Young Sherlock, released in March on Amazon Prime Video. Though not necessarily of the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movie universe, it does share those movies’ director, Guy Ritchie, who co-created the show and directed two episodes, according to Wikipedia. Ritchie gives us characters who, in tone at least, could age into the people we meet in Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (both available for rent or purchase), particularly when it comes to Finn’s James Moriarty, just a hot-headed student at Oxford here. He seems to permanently wear a bemused smile and encourages young Sherlock (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) in assorted hijinks. Sherlock is sent to Oxford to serve as a porter as a way of keeping him out of trouble — a plan by his older brother Mycroft (Max Irons, son of the Jeremy Irons) to keep his younger brother from messing up his budding government career. Sherlock and Moriarty quickly find themselves tangled up in assorted crimes that all seem to lead to larger conspiracies, and the show has buoyant fun with the various capers and ye olde spycraft. And yes, the Sherlock actor is one of those Fienneses (a nephew of Joseph Fiennes who shows up to play the Holmes boys’ father).

Another TV show running sort of in parallel to its creators’ movie universe, also on Amazon Prime Video, is the eight-episode late May release Spider-Noir, starring Nicolas Cage, who also voiced the Spider-Man Noir character in 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (available on Netflix), though the show’s Wikipedia page says that this character is a different version than the one in the movies. Here, Ben Reilly (Cage) is the rumpled 1930s gumshoe who was once the masked crimefighter The Spider. Though he still has web-slinging and spidey-sense abilities, Ben gave up the fight five years earlier when his fiancee was killed. That doesn’t stop his friend, reporter Robbie (Lamore Morris), from trying to convince Ben to get back in the game as the city sinks under the crime and corruption caused by Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), a mob boss with his fingers in all the pies. All dames and crooked cops and scampy street urchins, this series (which I am a few episodes into) is a fun watch that won me over with its classic detective mystery vibes and its smart deployment of Cage’s whole goofy deal. And you can watch the show in black and white or color — while the color has its charms, I particularly enjoyed the shadows and rich contrasts of the black and white version.

A direct movie-tie-in series is Disney+’s eight-episode Wonder Man, a “Marvel Spotlight” series released in January, which features the character Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), who first appeared in 2013’s Iron Man 3 and later in 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. (Both are on Disney+.) Introduced as the terrorist “The Mandarin” in Iron Man 3, Trevor is actually, as Tony Stark discovered, a middling actor who agreed to play the part of the villain in exchange for a good-time mansion and an endless supply of drugs. Here, he meets our hero Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) as both men are at an audition. Williams, who has just had his small guest part cut from a TV show after he had too many ideas about his role, is desperate for work, especially for a role in the upcoming reboot of Wonder Man, Simon’s favorite superhero movie as a kid. Simon works to convince his agent, the film’s casting director and the film’s director that he can be Wonder Man — while also trying to hide that he kind of is Wonder Man. Because of a tragic (hilarious) incident that led to the disappearance of Josh Gad (gamely playing himself), studios won’t let actual superpower-having people work in Hollywood. The unmasking of Simon’s powers — kind of non-specific, energy-related abilities — is his greatest fear, as it would mean the end of his Hollywood ambitions.

His ambitions make Simon a regular-guy super, not an Avenger wannabe. And his relationship with Slattery — who has his own secrets as well as long-standing actor-y issues, such as his rivalry with Joe Pantoliano (also gamely playing himself) — give this show an enjoyable The Studio sensibility.

Also in the Hulu-verse, you’ll find the just-finished first season of The Testaments, a sequel to the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale but a show that, perhaps because of its star Chase Infiniti, feels like it shares some vibes with Oscar winner 2025’s One Battle After Another as well. Like Infiniti’s Willa in One Battle, her Agnes in The Testaments is a teenage girl doing teenage girl things (going to dances, trying to assert some independence from her home life) during weird civil unrest. The Testaments picks up in the alt-America country Gilead, a Christian theocracy that segregates and oppresses women, where Agnes is expected to soon marry and “be fruitful.” A student at a finishing school for the daughters of the elite men of Gilead that is run by Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), Agnes is assigned to show the ropes to recent convert Daisy (Lucy Halliday). Or maybe Daisy is meant to spy on Agnes, as her fellow girls at the school warn her. What we in the audience know is that Daisy is a spy — an anti-Gilead plant picked by former handmaid June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) herself to infiltrate the school.

As the series goes on, we see Agnes develop a kind of steely strength and absolute loyalty to her friends that feels very spiritually connected with the government-fighting rebel-in-the-making that is Willa in One Battle. Infiniti also does a good job of selling the teen-girl-ness of Agnes, who, as Daisy explains in a later episode, has regular teen girl feelings and desires despite the oppressive society she’s growing up in. The relationships between the school’s girls — the ones headed for marriage, the ones who fear they might be left behind — is compelling and keeps you watching even when the Gilead of it all feels too much. (And if you need some “viva la revolución,” One Battle After Another is available on HBO Max.)

Featured photo: The Other Bennet Sister

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

(Alfred A. Knopf, 391 pages)

One of the stranger things to emerge from the internet is the tradwife influencer, a woman who uses the most modern of technology to promote a lifestyle that is decades or even centuries old.

Natalie Heller Mills is that woman, though the fictional creation of Caro Claire Burke’s soon-to-be-blockbuster novel Yesteryear. Think Ballerina Farm or Nara Smith or any other influencer with millions of followers who makes her own butter in which to fry eggs that she has collected from her yard in a flowing dress. Then give her an affable, aimless husband who is part of a political dynasty, a $5 million infusion in cash and a staff. It’s a novel made for our time, which is why Amazon has already acquired the film rights.

Burke brings a cynical eye to the enterprise, not so different from the “Angry Women” in the Instagram comments that Natalie is always complaining about. A blurb on the book cover calls it a “bold and biting satire,” but it’s darker than that, and Yesteryear tests how long a reader is willing to stick with a narrator who is deeply unlikeable.

When we meet Natalie, on “the last day of the life I imagined for myself,” she is living her best life, or at least the best life she presents to the world, on a 500-acre farm in Idaho, where she lives with her husband, Caleb, and five improbably named children: Clementine, Stetson, Samuel, Jessa and Junebug. Other than giving birth, she does very little mothering. Or farming. Two nannies who share small quarters in a barn do the child care and homeschooling, while Natalie mostly putters about being filmed while she does things like make sourdough boules with herbs positioned in the shape of a Nativity scene.

Natalie’s followers on social media love her and hate her. She mostly hates them. “It was a symbiotic relationship. I was a shark, and they were five million tiny fish, nipping at the nutrients along my belly,” she observes. “Little idiots. They were desperate to eat me. They had no idea I was the one who was keeping them alive.”

She built a profitable business, follower by follower, by showing them carefully curated images of her idyllic life and then selling them things in her online store. She has no moral qualms about putting her kids out into the world on social media, “Their best selves preserved inside the four walls of my phone like little bugs preserved in amber.”

But there are signs that things aren’t quite what they seem to be. She’s estranged from her sister, who also has five kids, and is mildly obsessed with the career path of her college roommate, Reena, even while having contempt for the life Reena has chosen. Clementine, turning 13, suddenly doesn’t want to be photographed. Her producer and videographer of two years has suddenly given notice, leaving a cryptic note that says, “I don’t think you’re a bad person. I think you’re just confused.” There are allegations of assault and adultery.

As bad as all that is, nothing is as bad as Natalie waking up one morning, freezing cold, in her house that isn’t her house anymore but is a rough cabin with no modern amenities, showing the date as 1855. In this house, she has a husband, also named Caleb, and four children, who look somewhat like hers but aren’t. But they all seem to think she is their mother.

When Caleb and Natalie had moved into the ranch they called Yesteryear, they’d spent untold money gutting it of modern renovations and making it look old but in a luxurious way: It had modern kitchen appliances but all hidden from view, a clawfoot tub “dripping in natural light” and a $30,000 chicken coop with doors that open and shut automatically. This was pioneer living, the kind that her great-great-grandparents lived. Terrified, she tries to flee, but finds this new version of her husband has turned abusive.

From there, we go back and forth into Natalie’s old life, and Natalie’s new life, slowly learning how the magical, fictional Yesteryear world came to be, and trying to figure out, with Natalie, how and why she came to be in this new, horrible place. Is it a reality show that she’s been deposited in without her consent? Is she going mad or being drugged? Which world is real?

It is a long time getting to the answers; Burke has shrewdly plotted this corn maze, although she overplays her hand with symbolism that is rich with contempt for religious zeal. Natalie was raised by a religious woman, and she makes a show of piety herself in ways that at times seem overly calculated. In one memorable line, she muses, shockingly, that Mary Magdalene was a woman who understood her assignment. It’s a line that will thrill the secular elites, but perhaps not land so well in the deep South. Then again, as we learn from the opening pages, Natalie is not meant to win our hearts, but to mess with our heads.

This is not a book that will warm your heart in any way, but it will keep you engrossed as it spins you every which way like a clothes dryer (which you will appreciate all the more for having spent some time in Natalie’s 1855 world). I closed the book wanting to shake it off like a bad dream. Will I watch the movie, which Anne Hathaway has already signed on to? Absolutely, because once she is in your head, Natalie will not easily leave. She’s not the Hannibal Lecter of tradwives, but she’s definitely no Ballerina Farm either — or rather let’s hope Ballerina Farm is no Natalie Heller Mills. A

Featured Photo: Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

Album Reviews 26/06/04

Aaron Bilodeau, Lid Licker (self-released/Bandcamp)

So here is a fellow from Milford, N.H., whose trip is experimental art-rock, unless he’s pulling my leg, but I’m now pretty much convinced he isn’t. The latter bit I have to mention because this was nothing like I’d expected in the area of loudness (let’s admit it, New Hampshirites, most of our local bands don’t know how to be really noisy) or seriousness, but this guy does seem to be on a mission, bless him. He apparently has a lot of projects, but this is him unfiltered, and by the way, he’s currently looking for Milford-area musicians to do some live shows with this collection of tunes, so look him up on Bandcamp if you’re interested. Anyway, the music is fun in its way, very hard to pinpoint at first, but in the end it evokes a three-way cross between Blue Oyster Cult, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Captain Beefheart. To wit, there’s a lot of blues-rock going on here (turbo-powered by a Deep Purple-style Hammond organ and the usual guitars and such), some (a bit too polite) spazzing and a healthy dose of alternative weirdness. I personally think he’s on to something that might really work with the right collaborators, so please give him a shout. B

Midge Ure, A Man Of Two Worlds (Chrysalis Records)

Let me scramble the usual lead-in: What can one say about this 72-year-old Scotsman that someone who was born in the last 40 years should even know? OK, he was in legendary New Wave band Ultravox, but he was also in Thin Lizzy, let’s start there; he hasn’t released an album since 2014, and “Midge” is his real name, Jim, pronounced backward. So he’s a firebrand and a loose cannon, as you now know, but he’s also an elite-level songwriter (he co-wrote the charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas” for the Band Aid project in 1984) who hasn’t lost his edge or writing ability at all; in fact he’s upped it by embracing his maturation. Half of this all-new double-LP set showcases his songwriting for vocalists, with single “Just Words” reaching for the show-stopping epicness usually reserved for new-jack divas like Taylor Swift, whereas the other half delves into commercial instrumental tuneage that sometimes gets a little mawkish (“The Space In-Between”). Put it this way, don’t pretend to understand what old people grew up listening to without knowing thing one about this guy. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• June 5 is when we’ll see the next bunch of new music CDs hit our Soundclouds, but first this message about the Manchvegas music scene! Some of you know that during the Precambrian era, when we were all just amoebas with only slightly less artistic taste than we have now, I was in a punk-metal band that made some records. This was before we amoebas crawled ashore and became humans, at which point I decided I liked money, so I gave up making records and became a software guy, then got totally sick of having any money at all and wrote some books. Anyway, when I was a simple amoeba, making records and playing at local clubs like the Granite Rock Club in Nashua, we played several shows with a local Manchvegas fellow who called himself Jonny (sometimes spelled “Johnee” or “Jonhee”) Earthquake. Now, let me tell you little twerking brats about the Manchester, New Hampshire, rock ’n’ roll scene back when Abraham Lincoln was president, it was a dangerous place, like half the bands were associated with the immortal and hilariously insane punk rocker GG Allin, who used to go on stage and — well, never you mind what he used to do on stage. Fine, I’m getting to it, so, we played around nine million shows with Jonny Earthquake when he was also making albums, and all I knew about him was that he loved Nick Cave the way you kids love Justin Bieber and Raffi today. Back then, Jonny dressed like a pirate everywhere he went, with a Captain Hook hat and coat and the whole works, so if anyone had asked me two weeks ago, “Is Jonny still around,” I would have assumed he’d either become a software engineer, bought an Arby’s or decided to become an actual pirate and moved to Aruba or whatnot. Funny thing, I was in the Manchester Market Basket (pronounced “MAH-kit bass-kit”) the other day and spotted a literal pirate buying some stuff just as I was leaving. There he was! It’s official, Johnee is alive, folks, I had no idea, and he still dresses like — you know, Jack Sparrow, around Manchvegas! We made some small talk about Nick Cave and the corporate greed Apocalypse and I told him who I was, the music-journo dude at this fine family newspaper, and he was like, “Oh. You.” Apparently Jonnee hates my taste or something, or maybe the fact that I’ve never mentioned his band, but I am making amends now! Ahem, OK, kids, put away your Roblox soundtrack albums and go buy a Jonee Earthquake album at Newbury Comics if they have any, that’d be great, support your local pirates bands! And that deftly and sublimely segues us over to the new album from Death Cab for Cutie, a band that’s about as punk as a Lawrence Welk polka marathon! This album, I Built You A Tower, features the single “Riptides,” which I was prepared to hate, which is good, because it’s like a 1970s Bob Welch B-side that doubles as a sleeping aid.

• The title track to Lizzo’s new LP Bitch interpolates the bratty 1997 Meredith Brooks pop hit that everyone thought was Alanis. There are swears and rapping, because of course there are.

• Liminal, the new album from avant garde London, U.K., composer Poppy Ackroyd, features a piano-driven instrumental titled “The Unknown” that reads like next-generation soundtracking, very nice stuff.

• Lastly, Modest Mouse releases their eighth full-length, An Eraser And A Maze, on Friday. Leadoff single “Look How Far” is pretty berserk, like if Strokes were possessed by Captain Beefheart, I don’t mind it at all.

Featured Photo: Aaron Bilodeau, Lid Licker and Midge Ure, A Man Of Two Worlds

Steamed pudding with rhubarb sauce

This isn’t the type of pudding you’re thinking of. It’s an old-fashioned, British-style steamed pudding adapted from a 1930 recipe booklet put out by a baking powder company that I found at a yard sale this spring. It’s like a dense cake, but steamed in a pot on the top of your stove, instead of baked in the oven. This sort of pudding goes back to pre-Roman times and makes a lot of sense if you think about how difficult it must have been to keep an oven at a consistent temperature. Using steam to cook would keep the temperature at a steady heat, so once you’d worked out the timing it would be an extremely reliable recipe.

Pudding

  • 2 cups (240 g) all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • 1/3 cup (about 5½ Tablespoons or 75 g) butter
  • ½ cup (99 g) sugar
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1 cup (227 g) whole milk
  • 1 cup (170 g) dried, sweetened cranberries

Rhubarb Sauce

  • About 3 cups (333 g) frozen, chopped rhubarb
  • An equal amount, by weight (333 g), sugar
  • Zest of 1 lemon
  • Juice of ½ lemon

Whisk the dry ingredients together — the flour, baking powder and salt — in a bowl, and set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar together with your electric mixer, then beat in the egg. Add the milk and the dry ingredients a little at a time, alternating between the two. Stir in the cranberries by hand.

Fill a “mold” with a cover with the batter. Back in the day, every kitchen would have a couple of pudding molds. If you have a small Bundt pan, that will work well. Crumple up some waxed paper or parchment paper, then cover the pan, and tie it on with twine. (Yes, I know that sounds like Too Much Trouble, but it really isn’t.) Alternatively, I used a 1-quart glass bowl with a plastic lid, and it worked well.

You probably have a steamer in one of the drawers in your kitchen, but you’ve never been sure what it is. It’s really easy to use. Look up “How to steam a pudding” online and you’ll find any number of short videos that will demonstrate it for you. If everything seems too complicated, place a couple of bricks in the bottom of your largest pot, then pour an inch or so of water into the bottom. Place your mold on top of the bricks, and that will work just as well.

(My only steaming hack is to wet a tea towel and drape it between the top of the pot and its lid, and use it to make a tight seal, so the steam is trapped in the pot.)

Steam the pudding over low heat for two hours.

Meanwhile, cook the chopped rhubarb and sugar together over medium heat in a small saucepan, stirring occasionally, until it comes to a boil. Remove it from the heat and stir in the lemon zest and juice. This makes a sweet but tart sauce that goes spectacularly well with your steamed pudding — and, if you are so inclined, a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Featured photo: Steamed pudding with rhubarb sauce. Photo by John Fladd.

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