The plum pudding's association with Christmas goes back to medieval England with the Roman Catholic church's decree that the pudding should be made on the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, that it be prepared with thirteen ingredients to represent Christ and the twelve apostles, and that every family member stir it in turn from east to west to honour the Magi and their supposed journey in that direction .[1] Recipes for plum puddings appear mainly, if not entirely, in the seventeenth century and later. Their possible ancestors include savoury puddings such as those in Harleian MS 279, crustades,[4] malaches whyte,[5] creme boiled (a kind of stirred custard), and sippets. Various ingredients and methods of these older recipes appear in early plum puddings.
When I got married in Scotland only a few months after arriving there, my English teacher gave me a cookery book as a present to get me familiar with Scottish cookery. The book, by Claire Macdonald turned out to be more than just a collection of recipes but a guide to seasonal cooking in Scotland. And what better way to know a culture than by its food? Despite all these years and moving around different countries, I still carry around with me my book of Seasonal Cooking. It reminds me of cold and dark Scottish days, of whisky flavours, the smell of smoked fish and the taste of gorgeous hot puddings. This recipe of the Christmas pudding has always stuck in my mind as Lady MacDonald tells us that she uses her baby's bath to mix the ingredients rather than any other kitchen dish!
I use a pressure cooker for the steaming but I remember when I was a small kid back in the 60s, when we had one of those big old-fashioned anthracite-stoked ranges, my mother boiled the puddings in a large open cast-iron pot of the type that originally would have hung over a big open fire on a “crane ”. The kitchen resembled a laundry, with all the steam! She traditionally started to make the mixture on 8th December and we would d“helpd” (ahem!) as we were off school on that day, of course. She would reserve it under cover for a day or so before sealing it in the pudding bowls for the boiling. I think she made-up the Christmas cake mixture as well on that day. For us as kids it really marked the start of Christmas. Happy memories.
British families gather around the Christmas table as the pudding they've made is set ablaze before the children dig in to find treasures hidden in the middle. Martha Teichner travels to London to make Christmas pudding with British TV chef, Nigella Lawson and visits family-run pudding maker, Cole's Traditional Foods, which churns out more than a million puddings a year.
