Christmas Pudding ◆ A Victorian Recipe

★ About this recipe: With Christmas coming up we've been rifling through our books pulling out a select few festive recipes, starting with this 1868 recipe for a Christmas Pudding. While sweet and savoury puddings have been eaten on Christmas Day for centuries, like a lot of Christmastime traditions that remain today, Christmas Puddings as we generally know them were popularised in Britain during the 19th Century. The dark, rich Christmas Puddings that we are familiar with now were often a part of the Victorian Christmas spread, but they were not Christmas Puddings. They were Plum Pud-dings. While Plum Puddings and Christmas Puddings may be one and the same thing now, in the 1800s they were two different things. The original Victorian Christmas Pudding is golden with deep specks of dried fruit, lighter than a plum pudding (which probably went down well after a really heavy Christmas dinner), often decorated with a sprig of holly and, at least according to this recipe, either served with burning brandy or arrowroot sauce. We went for the brandy. One thing we were unable to reproduce exactly was the size of the pudding. Victorian pud-dings were truly massive things that would feed more than 20 people; you’d be lucky to find a pudding basin and steaming equipment large enough for it. Being aware of this, we halved all of the ingredient amounts given and still ended up with enough pudding mixture to fill three standard sized 12cm pudding basins with a little extra left over (around 13 servings). The amounts listed below and in the video are the amounts that we used. If you want just enough mixture to fill one 12cm pudding basin, divide these amounts by 3 and steam for the same amount of time. If, in future, you wish to make a true Victorian-scale Christmas Pudding and have a pudding basin and steaming equipment large enough for it, multiply these amounts by 2 and steam for around 6 hours. __________________________________________ ★ Ingredients: • 227g raisins • 227g currants • 57g sultanas • 227g suet • 170g breadcrumbs • ½ pint of milk • 5 eggs • 170g mixed citrus peel • 1 small nutmeg • Plain flour (we used 2 tbsp.) • 1 glass of brandy ★ Full instructions: https://www.handeddown.co.uk/post/chr... __________________________________________ ★ Our Website: handeddown.co.uk ★ Instagram: @handeddown.uk __________________________________________ ★ Book Details: Warne’s Model Cookery and Housekeeping Book (1868) Compiled and Edited By: Mary Jewry Publisher: Fredrick Warne & Co. (Bedford Street, Covent Garden, London, England, U.K.), printers: Savill, Edwards and Co. Printers (Chandos Street, Covent Garden, London, Eng-land, U.K.) __________________________________________ ♪ Music: Angel’s Dream by Aakash Gandhi