The Englishman's Plum Pudding
Maggie Black completes her history of the year in food, with a look at the history of a festive favourite
How did the glossy, currant-speckled cannon-ball on Victorian-style Christmas
The Englishman's Plum Pudding
Maggie Black completes her history of the year in food, with a look at the history of a festive favourite
How did the glossy, currant-speckled cannon-ball on Victorian-style Christmas cards come to be the centrepiece of the Englishman's Christmas dinner – and of no one else's? Decked with a holly sprig, blue flames licking round it, a plum pudding with brandy butter symbolises our Christmas. But why?
The British Christmas pudding has two sources, both dating back to 1430 or earlier. First, there were standing 'pyes' or 'cof fyns' of tough flour paste, containing meat or fish, fat and dried fruit from Spain or the Levant. Rich men's fare, they were popular for two reasons. First, meat, poultry and fish which went off quickly could be preserved for some time in a case which contained plenty of sugary dried fruit and was filled with butter. Second, the dried fruit replaced to some extent the sweetness of costly honey and sugar.
Meat, poultry and fish were slaughtered and preserved in quantity in Autumn for two reasons. First, except for breeding stock, neither ox in stall nor pike in stewpond could be fed through winter. Geese, which could, were still young and fat from stubble feeding, and at their best, but later would gobble man's precious stored winter grain; so they too had to die and, being fatty, were an obvious flesh food to preserve for winter use. The second reason was that the great twelve-daylong Christmas feast, the annual binge for rich and poor alike, had to be prepared weeks ahead. The great butter-filled'minced' pies (in effect, preserves not unlike French 'confits') could be used both as a festival treat and as a practical made-ahead dish to feed a number of unoccupied workers and hangers-on for nearly a fortnight.
By the eighteenth century, improved stock-feeding and cheaper sugar had made meat preserving and spicing less necessary; so wholly savoury meat pies were coming into fashion, and sweeter'minced' pies with very little meat. Both kinds lost their butter filling, being served with butter scraped over them instead, or with a separate 'hard' butter, sugar and wine'sauce'. Both had become, like their sweetened-meat original, traditional Christmas foods.
The second source of our Christmas Pudding, was the Christmas pottage. Thick sweet-sour meat or vegetable pottages had come down from Roman times. They were particularly popular with the British because widespread forests supplied plentiful wood fuel until the seventeenth century, the 'boiled dinner' in a single cauldron was the outstanding feature of medieval British cooking. Pottages were particularly suitable for this, being simmered long and slowly over the flames. They were often as thick as muesli; and for rich tables, they included elaborately spiced meat and fish stews containing dried fruits and sugar. We have many of the recipes: white porray, joutes, charlet, cawdel fery, bukkenade, mortrews or mawmeny and the gold-and-white 'blanc desore'. For special occasions, some of these were served with a wine sauce reinforced with brandy which was set alight so that the pottage was served 'flambeed'.
Some of these were *standing' (stiff) pottages, thickened with breadcrumbs and egg yolks, coloured red or bright yellow, flavoured with sugar and dried fruits. Mawmeny royal, for instance, contained teased (minced) game or poultry, spices, ground almonds, breadcrumbs and sugar.
Like meat-and-sweet'minced pyes', both running and standing sweetened pottages continued in use until the seventeenth century. Then most of them went rapidly out of fashion because much closer ties with the Continent brought in many foreign made-up dishes, especially after the Restoration. Two pottages however survived. One was the Scots Cock-a-Leekie, a running 'plum' pottage made with chicken and plums (prunes). The other was called, rather unfairly, just Stewed Broth.
Stewed Broth was, as near as possible, the direct forerunner of Christmas Pudding. We first hear of it in about 1420, as a standing pottage made with veal, mutton or' chicken, thickened with bread, reddened with sanders (sandelwood) and rich with currants. By the time of Elizabeth I, it had prunes added, an important novelty in boiled food although known in pies for some time past. These dried plums had now become so popular that their name became a portmanteau label for all dried fruits, so that goods containing any of them, eg currant cakes, now became called 'plum' cakes. Stewed broth thus became 'Plum Pottage'.
Cheap sugar altered the whole pattern of our feeding. In particular, it made bland foods sweet, harsh and bitter meats and fruit palatable; it therefore lessened the dependence on spices, and so made a division into savoury and sweet dishes possible. Thus, like pies, pottage turned into two kinds of porr