About 6 minutes to read aloud.

The pudding would not set.

Mrs Hobb had stirred it clockwise, as her mother had taught her, and then anti-clockwise, in case her mother had been wrong. She had added more egg, more suet, more brandy, and a spoonful of black treacle for luck, though she did not hold with luck as a rule. It was Christmas Eve, the pudding sat in its basin like a sulking toad, and it was, if anything, wetter than when she'd started.

"It'll set in the pan," said Nell, who was eleven and had opinions.

"It has been in the pan for four hours," said Mrs Hobb, "and it has not so much as thought about setting."

Word travelled, as it does in a village with one baker and no secrets. By six o'clock the butcher's boy had arrived, insisting that a pudding needed a coin driven through its centre to give it something to hold onto. He drove one through. The pudding closed over it like a pond over a dropped stone and carried on being liquid.

By seven, the choirmaster came, certain that the problem was musical: puddings, he said, set to the rhythm of the stirring, and Mrs Hobb had likely been stirring in common time when the recipe wanted a waltz. He conducted the pudding for a while with a wooden spoon. It did not improve, though the choirmaster left satisfied that he had, at least, ruled something out.

By eight, a retired sea captain who lodged above the smithy arrived uninvited, on the grounds that he had once set a plum duff mid-Atlantic in a Force Nine gale and this could not be harder than that. He wanted to know what she'd used for suet, sniffed it, pronounced it sound, and then sat by the fire eating spoonfuls of it raw "for testing purposes" until Mrs Hobb took the basin away from him.

By nine, a woman none of them recognised knocked at the door and announced, without being asked, that she had once set a pudding for a duchess and this was clearly a job for cold water, and could she borrow the coal cellar. She was allowed to try. The pudding, lowered into the cold of the cellar, came back forty minutes later exactly as it had gone down, only colder.

Nell had stopped believing anyone would fix it and had gone to sit on the front step with her coat over her nightdress, which is where she was when a very large man in a coat the colour of holly berries stopped at the gate, stamped the snow off his boots, and asked, quite ordinarily, whether there was any chance of a cup of tea, as it was a long night and his hands had gone past cold into something else entirely.

She let him in. Nobody in the kitchen thought to ask who he was, because a kitchen at nine o'clock on Christmas Eve, mid-crisis, does not stop to be surprised by one more stranger. He sat by the range, warmed his hands, and looked at the pudding for a good while without saying anything.

"It's not going to set," he said eventually. "Some years they don't. I've known good cooks lose a whole pudding to a wet Christmas Eve and no fault of theirs at all."

"Then what do we do with it?" said Mrs Hobb, who by now had stopped caring about pride and only wanted an answer.

"Pour it over something that's already finished," he said. "It'll do very well as a sauce. Better than most sauces, if you ask me. Nobody's pudding has to be a brick to be worth eating."

Which is what they did. The pudding, thick and dark and entirely unset, went in a jug the next day and was poured over the baked apples instead, and it was, by every account round that table, the best thing on it. The butcher's boy asked for three helpings. The sea captain admitted he'd never tasted better, even mid-Atlantic. The woman who had cooked for a duchess said nothing, which everyone agreed was for the best.

Nell never did find out who the man in the holly-coloured coat was, or where he went after his tea, though she noticed, clearing the cups, that his had not left a single ring on the saucer, however hot it had been.