Thankfully, it wasn’t long before plum pudding was back on the Christmas menu and a celebrated part of the season – King George I is said (in an oft-told, but unsubstantiated, tale) to have requested it as part of his first Christmas feast in 1714, leading to his King Pudding nickname.
As the 19th century arrived, a Yuletide boiled cake of fruits, sugar and spices, often topped with a sprig of holly, had become popular, with recipes resembling the pudding we know today first appearing in the 1830s. In 1845, for example, cook Eliza Acton referred to Christmas pudding in her bestselling book Modern Cookery for Private Families. It was, after all, the Victorian era which cemented many of the festive traditions we celebrate today, including Christmas cards, decorated trees and a roasted bird for our main meal. Around this time, more families also began to embrace Stir-up Sunday, the tradition of making the pudding on the last Sunday before Advent, which takes its name from an Anglican church prayer.
It may be of British origin, but the custom of Christmas pudding has been shipped all over the world, with versions still popular in countries including Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In the UK, it was traditionally seen as a unifying dish which rose above class, eaten by Dickens' struggling Cratchits and described as a national symbol in a 1850 newspaper article.
The addition of brandy butter came in the first decades of the 1900s, when it was also more commonplace to pour alcohol into the pudding itself, though a similar delicacy known as rum butter had been a speciality in Cumbria for some time before. And if you still hide a Christmas coin in your pudding to bring the finder good luck, that’s a tradition which is said to date back as early as the 1300s, when a dried pea or small silver ring was baked into a Twelfth Night Cake. From its early days as a porridge which was more sustenance than celebration, Christmas pudding has certainly been on quite the journey to its role as a dish at the heart of Christmas cheer.
