Fruitcake might be a bad joke at Christmas in America, but for most Britons, rich, fruity Christmas pudding, steamed for long hours on the holiday stove, still taps into something visceral in the national psyche. The problem here is that the sense of pleasure rarely makes the leap from the English psyche to the English palate these days — it’s a long story, and one that Americans should appreciate.
Pudding is an ancient British food, originating way back in the medieval period as plum pottage. It joined with mince pies to warm the heart and stomach in manorial halls flecked with candlelight in which diners sat in hierarchical order stretching away from the high table. The taste for sweet dried fruits mixed with meat and wine and exuding the heady waft of spices began with the Norman invasion of Britain; it was part of a flourishing in the culinary arts across Europe that marked a sophistication in the kitchen unseen since the Romans.
Because fruits were considered dangerous raw, they were almost always cooked and strained into pulps. Dried fruits, especially currants, came back with the spices discovered by Crusaders in the East and were soon mixed with meat in pottages and pies. For feasts and celebrations, cooks stewed beef with imported dried plums and broth, wine, onions, herbs and spices.
As with every aspect of medieval life, religion soon reshaped what was on the table: for the many fasts and Lent, the British developed meatless versions of pudding, including “figgey,” made with figs and bread boiled in wine, raisins and pine nuts and highly spiced.
Gradually, along with brawn (headcheese), boar’s head and mince pies, puddings became favorites for the celebration of Twelfth Night, the end of the Christmas season. Recipes for plum pottage lingered for centuries; Elizabethans used veal, mutton or rooster in place of beef and mixed in raisins, currants and nutmegs. By the late 17th century, it was known often as “Christmas broth” or plum porridge — an indication of its thick consistency. (The silver charms or coins sometimes pushed into the pudding are a faint whiff of Twelfth Night cakes, which had a hidden pea or bean that bestowed on its lucky finder the role of king or queen for the night.)
By the 1780s, few cooks still included meat in their recipes, but many began to add sweetly alcoholic claret or sherry. During the 19th century the pudding evolved as part of the newly codified Christmas traditions, eventually being made with suet, dried fruits, alcohol, flour and eggs, then left to mature for a year. In the end, it was steamed for up to five hours, to be delivered to a table like poor Mrs. Cratchit’s, with its smell (and, too often, taste) like washing day.
Thus it’s little surprise that today the pudding is served really only once a year — once too many for most — and while there is still perhaps the waft of something heroic about its survival, it is really a museum piece more than a dessert.
This is where America comes in. Because while the English hung on to their pudding with steadily decreasing enthusiasm for centuries, they let go another great Elizabethan favorite that might have had more staying power: pumpkin pie. First introduced to Tudor England by the French, the flesh of the “pompion” was quickly accepted as a pie filler. However, while pumpkin pie sailed with the Pilgrims back to the birthplace of its main ingredient — where it survived in more or less its original form — it all but disappeared in its country of origin. This, perhaps, spared it from some of the misguided experimentation that has left Britons staring at their Fortnum & Mason bowls with queasiness every December: another case of frontier American simplicity being a hidden virtue.
So, Americans, enjoy your pumpkin pies, but take a moment to count your culinary blessings and to let your mind stretch back in a long line of generations to connect emotionally with flavors that have worked their way into our very blood — they are the very taste of history.
Kate Colquhoun, the author of Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking.