It’s to the Crusaders’ medieval efforts to recreate the taste of their Holy Land adventures in the comfort of their own castles that we owe the forerunner of the Christmas pudding: “pottage”. This was a spicy, soupy mixture of meat, grains and fruit that would have been served on in large, round hollowed-out “trencher” loaves, like edible bowls. Forget benevolent cultural exchange — this ancient act of cultural appropriation evokes not Gary Lineker style liberal-internationalism so much as that worldview’s more red-blooded ancestor: evangelism at swordpoint.
By Tudor times, Christmas Day was well-established as the start of twelve days of riotous celebration, in which a central role was played by “plum porridge”. This was a stew made with slow-cooked beef shin, dried fruit and wine, thickened with bread and spiced with mace, cloves and nutmegs. It’s clearly a descendant of the crusaders’ efforts at Middle Eastern cuisine.
After the execution of Charles I, the Puritans made a concerted effort to wean the English off the plays, pub-going, dancing and general “misrule” that made for a typical Twelve Days of Christmas at the time. Cromwell’s government sought to crack down on this pagan impiety in a December 1644 ordinance that Christmas Day should be a day of fasting and humility, instead of “giving liberty to carnall and sensuall delights”. Naturally, fasting and humility meant a crackdown on the consumption of plum porridge, now deemed a “heathenish and a papistical practice”.
The high-mindedness didn’t last. The English yearning for strong drink and stodgy food in midwinter was not to be denied, and the Puritan ban on all things Christmas didn’t last much beyond the 1660 Restoration. In 1662 the diarist Samuel Pepys’ Christmas dinner was “a mess of brave plum porridge and a roasted pullet”.
And yet, some 50 years later, George’s dish drew a line under the wild revelry of a medieval Christmas of “misrule”. The Hanoverian update stripped the meat from the Crusader-style plum-porridge in favour of a fruit-only dessert, even as George cemented the role of English monarchs as ceremonial: an act inseparable from the inauguration of modern Britain.
So the story of plum-pudding, both ancient and modern, cuts to the dark, ambiguous heart and irrepressibly pagan edge of English winter revelry. It encompasses not just the steam of the Cratchits’ kitchen or the mawkishness of a John Lewis advert, but long ages of political and religious violence and a complex interplay between elite and popular tastes. It’s just a pudding; but it captures in miniature how national habits that seem to have existed forever in fact evolve with glacial slowness — and sometimes also with sudden, astonishing savagery.
As for “Stir-Up Sunday”, which lands this weekend, not even this name is as it seems. It refers not to the kitchen — though it’s traditional for all the family to take a turn stirring the pudding — but to the collect for the day, in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer:
Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
If you’re tempted to spend next Sunday stirring up not just the wills of God’s faithful people, but also a Christmas pudding, my personal favourite comes from another ground-breaking culinary classic, Eliza Acton’s 1845 Modern Cookery for Private Families.
Acton’s recipe is exceptionally light and unctuous, with none of the grittiness or bitter note that currants can inflict on a Christmas pudding. In homage to the Georgian name “plum-pudding” (even though the Georgian one actually contains no plums) I swap dried fruit for gin-pickled damsons, a byproduct of the infused gin we make with fruit from our garden. On Stir-Up Sunday I’ll strain a jar of this pungent pink brew, then pit the boozy damsons and use them in the pudding. It gives a soft headiness and deep, almost cherry-like aroma that’s quintessentially Christmas in our household.
Today, there’s a tendency to think the foreign or self-conscious elements of a tradition render it meaningless. But as with the innovation of damsons in a (traditionally plum-less) “plum-pudding”, a living tradition blends foreign and domestic, violent and festive, ancient and modern into something living. Christmas pudding will no doubt go on evolving into the future. Because sneered at though they might be, the traditions of a place have a persistent life of their own — even as they change over time and under new pressures.
New elite influences may give a tradition new forms, as with the crusaders popularising Middle Eastern spices. Traditions may mellow over time, as under George I. But if there’s a silver sixpence in the pudding for today’s anti-traditionalist elite, it’s the lesson from Cromwell’s Protectorate: that a prudent ruling class seeks to shape, not to abolish, the tastes and practices of those they rule. Otherwise, they will likely find themselves outlasted by the tastes and preferences they sought to extinguish.
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