Anna Selby - The Victorian Christmas

Making the Christmas pudding was not a purely culinary affair. It was hedged around with traditions and superstitions. The mixture would be stirred by everyone in the house, eyes closed while they made a wish. The stirring had to go in a clockwise direction or the wish would not be granted. During the stirring, the cook would add the charms that would be found in someones piece of the pudding on Christmas Day. The usual trinkets included a ring, a coin (usually a silver farthing) and a thimble. When the diners ate their pudding, the one who found a ring could expect a wedding, the coin symbolised the gaining of wealth and the thimble meant depending on the interpretation either a life of blessedness or spinsterhood.

There is some debate over where the tradition of trinkets in the pudding began. The Victorians were certainly the first people to use them in the spherical Christmas pudding as they invented it. However, the custom of hiding a charm in a cake is a pagan one and goes back to Twelfth Night Cake. The charm in Twelfth Night Cake was a bean and the lucky finder became the king of Twelfth Night whereby hangs another tale to be told later in this book.

The Victorians invented, among so many other things, the muslin cloth. While this may seem small fry in comparison to the railways and the telephone, the muslin cloth nevertheless transformed nineteenth century cooking in the spherical shape of the pudding. While this could be sweet, in the modern sense of pudding, it could also be savoury whatever the ingredients, the muslin cloth held the round pudding together while it steamed. But in both sweet and savoury puddings, suet was the vital ingredient and a particularly useful one for filling the hungry bellies of the poor.

In the less wealthy household, where meat was scarce, it was usual to have something filling before you reached the meat course. This was often a suet pudding or a Yorkshire pudding and it would take the edge off the appetite so that less meat would be needed. Mrs Gaskells Mr Holbrook gave this view of domestic economy in her novel Cranford .

When I was a young man, we used to keep strictly to my fathers rule, No broth, no ball; no ball, no beef and always began dinner with broth. Then we had suet puddings, boiled in the broth with the beef: and then we had the meat itself. If we did not sup our broth, we had no ball, which we liked a deal better; and the beef came last of all, and only those had it who had done justice to the broth and the ball.

By far the most long-lasting ball pudding of the Victorians was, though, the Christmas pudding which has retained its popularity to this day. They took older recipes originally, it was a sloppy, porridgey dish and made a solid pudding. They also took out one of the most important original ingredients beef. Mincemeat and minced meat were in earlier times the same thing. Only during the nineteenth century did mincemeat come to refer to the dried fruit and spices that are the principal ingredient in mince pies. Early plum puddings used minced beef and mixed it with sugar, spices and dried fruit. The Victorians did, of course, keep the suet (as do most puddings today) as a binding ingredient. Suet is the raw animal fat that is usually found around the kidneys and so they did, in effect, keep some meat content in the recipe.