Christmas Down Under

plum pud endurance

Stubborn sentiment has seen generations of Kiwis celebrating Christmas day with a parody of cuisine and customs mimicking a European winter, including flaming plum pudding and Aunty Doris’ tipsy trifle that have survived over 200 years of sun-kissed (sometimes), beach-walking, fly-swotting, barbecue-flavoured, Yuletides Down Under. 

The fickleness of our December weather was a feature of the first Kiwi Christmas recorded 367 years ago in 1642 when Abel Tasman’s crew coped with a summer gale off the West Coast while hunkering down to their Christmas Day repast. 

Captain James Cook logged the second Kiwi Christmas in 1769 while sheltering his Endeavour from another turn of bad weather. His log also mentions a boisterous lack of sobriety among his crew, heralding a cherished ritual to the Kiwi Christmas table that has lasted 240 years. 

The sun finally beamed down on the third recorded Kiwi Christmas in 1814 when the portly, Santa-looking, Reverend Samuel Marsden preached a service to an obliging group of Northland Maori. It wasn’t mentioned if they were then treated to flaming plum pudding and a glass of sherry, but almost 200 years on and the Kiwi Christmas meal is one of the few culinary family occasions when even the venerable creamed pavlova takes second place to the plum pudding and the custard trifle. 

Plum pudding was the original ‘boil in the bag’ cuisine. The old folks used to place their fruit-suet mixture into a linen bag (like a recycled flour bag) and boil it in their laundry coppers; a big wood-fired cauldron that pre-dated the washing machine. The cooked clothed puds were hung from the laundry rafters before Christmas to mature and could last until the following autumn. 

Christmas pudding was traditionally made on Stir Sunday in November (named after the sermon, not the mixing bowl) when family members took turns stirring the bowl from east to west during the preparation to honour the Three Kings and were rewarded with a wish. The round cannonball shape and ignition with spirits reaches back to solar symbolism and the ancient Celtic Festival of Yule – a northern hemisphere mid-winter celebration of the return of the sun. Yuletide and Christmas became one in the 4th century when Pope Julius brought together Christ’s Mass on December 25 and a colourful number of Druid, Norse, Roman and Germanic solar festivals.

The pudding took centre stage on the ‘modern’ Christmas table in the mid 19th century when a young Queen Victoria married a German who brought with him a wealth of European Yuletide traditions to a British society seeking cheer from the cold, mid-winter bleakness of a newly industrialised society. With the help of sentimental scribes, such as Charles Dickens, and a young home economist by the name of Mrs Beeton, the ‘Pickwickian Christmas’ - with its roasted meal swept to the extended family table as village church bells peeled, beech logs blazed in the hearth, and winter temperature froze a stark white landscape outside - became ingrained in English culinary heritage. And so did the Victorian plum pudding, decorated with holly, flavoured with brandy sauce and studded inside with hand-moulded porcelain pudding dolls and silver charms (boots, bells, thimbles, rings, buttons and horseshoes). These silver trinkets gradually disappeared and were, until the arrival of the copper and brass alloys with decimal currency, replaced with silver sixpences and three-penny bits. 

The European immigrants in the 19th century enjoyed their first Kiwi Christmas in a foreign lush green forested land, rich in summer blossoms and noisy birdlife, by taking their Yuletide feast into the sunshine, onto the beach, under the carmine blossoms of the pohutakawa tree, and into the bush under the nikau palm. 

And the plum pudding went with them – hot or cold, with egg custard and fresh farm cream from the rich pastures of the new colony. 

Isabella B’s original 

Foodstyle Review’s cookbook library has the second (and first hardback) edition of Household Management (1869) written by Mrs Isabella Beeton featuring the definitive Victorian Christmas Pudding recipe. Published by her husband after her death in 1865, the recipes were not necessarily ‘original’ but it was the first time ingredients were listed at the beginning of a recipe - a format still used today. There are 18 dessert ‘pudding’ recipes in this edition and the one on page 863 (index reference no 1837), about halfway through this hefty tome, is the original ‘Christmas Plum Pudding’. 

Ingredients: “One and a half pound of raisins, half a pound of currants, half a pound of mixed peel, three quarters of a pound of breadcrumbs, three quarters of a pound of suet, eight eggs and a wineglass full of brandy.” 

A pound equals around 450 grams. Suet is common in old dumpling and pudding recipes and is raw beef or mutton fat, especially the hard fat found around the loins and kidneys. It was coarsely grated to make it ready to use, after any connective tissue and other non fat matter was trimmed. It has a low melting point, so ideal for ‘buttering’ the likes of dumplings and puddings. The shredded packaged suet available in supermarkets these days has been dehydrated and mixed with (rice) flour to make it stable at room temperature, so is a little different in ‘texture’ to fresh suet bought from a butcher. You can’t substitute it with vegetable shortening, so the original recipe is not for vegetarians. Method: “Stone and cut the raisins in halves, but do not chop them; wash, pick, and dry the currants, and mince the suet finely; cut the candied peel into thin slices, and grate the bread into fine crumbs.” 

Seeding the raisins implies the recipe is using the large muscatel fruit, and the mix peel could have been whole dried candied fruit. This might explain modifications to the recipe over the past 100 years with the addition of a lot of sugar and salt.

“When all these dry ingredients are prepared, mix well together; then moisten the mixture with the eggs, which should be well beaten, and the brandy; stir well, that everything should be very thoroughly blended, and press the pudding into a buttered mould; tie it down tightly with a floured cloth, and boil for five or six hours. It may be boiled in a cloth without a mould.” 

Although the number of eggs to moisten the dry mixture is high, later recipes also used juice of citrus fruits, and other alcoholic beverages - wine or beer - in the initial preparation. 

Victorian table decorations were, like their interior house decorating, elaborate, detailed and cluttered. As Beeton says on the end of the recipe, “moulds of every shape and size are manufactured for these puddings.” 

Moulds fell out of fashion, but not the classic canon-ball shape. And whether cooked simply in a linen cloth or in a mould (in a cloth) the pudding was kept hanging in the cloth until it was matured (up to three months and at least a week) and consumed. “The day it is to be eaten, plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling for at least two hours, then turn it out of the mould [and linen bag] and serve with brandy sauce… on Christmas day a sprig of holly is usually placed in the middle of the pudding, and about a wine glass of brandy poured around it, which, at the moment of serving, is lighted, and the pudding thus brought to the table encircled in flames.” 

Unlike the other pudding recipes in this section of Beeton’s 1869 edition, there is no butter, sugar, milk, flour, spice or salt in the Christmas pud. 

The 21st century Christmas pudding, in comparison, is more ‘fruit cake like’ with flour and raising agents and a grocery shop of ingredients, such as grated carrot, muscovado sugar, chopped prunes, diced dried figs, dark beer, golden syrup, and mixed spice, cardamom and ginger. In Isabella’s day the pudding was served with brandy sauce (a roux of flour and butter with sugar and a lot of brandy) , which has given way to whipped cream, custards, ice cream and even yoghurt. 

Interesting – the method of ‘boiling’ the pudding survives but is usually referred to as ‘steaming’. One modern method is to wrap the pudding in tin foil and steam it in a rice cooker! 

As for Aunty Doris’ tipsy trifle? Sorry, intellectual copyright laws keep this recipe secured in Foodstyle Review’s recipe library.

Plum what? 

Plum pudding has been traditionally served at holiday times in the UK for some centuries with the name ‘Christmas pudding’ popping up the 1858 Anthony Trollope novel, Dr Thorne. However, it is also mentioned in Beeton’s first edition (1861) of Household Management so either the name caught on like a bush fire after Trollope’s book came out, or the recipe was already common to household kitchens much earlier than that. There are two explanations of the ‘plum’ in the title, although pudding never featured any. The word plum also described dried grapes (raisins), prunes and other fruits centuries ago, and Samuel Johnson’s 18th century dictionary (the first) defines ‘plum’ as a “raisin; grape dried in the sun.” 

Dried plums and prunes were also used in pies in medieval cooking and these could have been gradually replaced by raisins.

Summer 2009

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