Bob Dylan's Favorite Dessert Is Hundreds Of Years Old

Outside of fame's spotlight, celebrities are like everyone else, with unique favorite treats. Elvis Presley's favorite cake was a rich, buttery pound cake, made especially for him on special occasions by a family friend. Frank Sinatra loved cherry Life Savers so much that, when he died, he was buried with a roll of the candies in his coffin. For famed singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, dessert time calls for a British confection that is hundreds of years old: figgy pudding (per YouTube).

While the modern incarnation of Christmas puddings, like figgy pudding, is a British tradition dating back as far as the 1600s, many of us have only heard of the dessert via Christmas carols and classic literature. How the Minnesota-born and raised Dylan first came to try the dish isn't publicly known. The artist has spent considerable time in the United Kingdom over the course of his career, though, logging hundreds of performances there, and he even co-owned an estate in the Scottish Highlands for many years.

Puddings in the British sense aren't the same as American puddings, which strictly include custard-like treats that Jell-O and other brands have modernly packaged in cups and boxed mixes. In the U.K., the word "pudding" has a twofold meaning — it broadly refers to the after-dinner course we Americans call "dessert," and it also refers to specific dishes, which can be either sweet or savory.

Christmas puddings are traditionally boiled or steamed, lending moisture to the dense, cake-like dish and resulting in a characteristic texture one can't achieve in the dry heat of an oven. The figgy pudding recipe Bob Dylan favors calls for steaming.

In 2006, Bob Dylan shared his preferred figgy pudding recipe with fans on a special Christmas episode of "Theme Time Radio Hour," his former weekly radio show. The singer prefaced the recipe by sharing that he'd received "a lot of letters asking about this."

Dylan's preparation of the dessert largely follows the traditional approach, aside from the omission of aging or alcohol, like brandy or rum. The dry ingredients in his pudding include flour, salt, breadcrumbs, mixed spice, baking powder, and dark brown sugar. The recipe also calls for shredded suet, which is an ingredient made from the fat found around animal kidneys. To these components are added chopped dried figs, the zest and juice of one lemon, milk, and beaten eggs. The resulting mixture, which Dylan specified should have a "soft, dropping consistency" (via YouTube), is then added into a greased, tightly covered two-pint pudding basin (a special dish designed for steaming puddings) and steamed for three hours.

In the absence of a pudding basin, one can use a bundt pan, a heatproof glass bowl, or even a coffee can to steam figgy pudding. Suet — readily available in the U.K. but not necessarily easy to come by in the United States — can also be swapped out for vegetable shortening or butter, though either one should be frozen and grated.

The musician shared that he prefers to serve his figgy pudding topped with heated golden syrup — another British staple, also known as light treacle — as well as "a generous pouring of custard" (per YouTube). Custard, in the U.K., is runny and usually served warm. He added that his engineer tech liked to top the pudding with vanilla ice cream, an oft-used addition to the dessert, which Dylan claimed to not understand.