Christmas pudding is all that remains at today’s Christmas feast from the old Anglo-Saxon table, groaning also with boar’s head, venison and roast mutton. Early puddings were actually a meat and root vegetable soup thickened with crumbed bread, spiced with nutmeg and pepper and with dried plums (prunes) as the sweetener. And it was eaten at the start of the meal.
Over time, the meat and the vegetables, except perhaps for a carrot, disappeared – although the suet stayed – and more dried fruits were added. Adding alcohol (claret at first), and dropping the meat, meant the pudding could be made way ahead of Christmas and stored. On Christmas Day the solid mixture was wrapped in a cloth and hung over a pot of boiling water to be reheated, which, if you were lucky, produced a perfect sphere rather than the pudding bowl shape we recognise today.
Olive Cromwell in 1664 banned the “lewd custom†of eating Christmas pudding – too pleasurable and too many echoes of a pagan holiday. Nigella Lawson says Quakers “making Christmas pudding sound rather more exciting than it is†condemned it as “the invention of the scarlet whore of Babylonâ€, all of which probably gave the pud a terrific boost in popularity.
Traditionally, each member of the family, the youngest first to the oldest, took a turn of stirring the pudding mix, and coins would be hidden inside.
Now is the time to make Christmas puddings and cakes to allow the flavours to fully develop in time for Christmas. Many people like to follow their own or their Grandma’s recipe for a Christmas pudding, and the self-serve bins in our Pulse section allow you buy exactly as much as you want of each ingredient. Or, if you don’t have a favourite recipe, give us a day’s notice, and we will make up a pack of everything you need for a Christmas pudding.
We have in stock 1kg Pulse Christmas cake mixes for a family-size cake in gluten-free and wheat-flour varieties. All you need to add to them is eggs, butter and alcohol.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
