In one of the opening scenes of "A Christmas Carol"
by Charles Dickens, Ebenezer Scrooge declares to his young nephew Fred "If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled in his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart." That's my best Scrooge you just got there. Now old Ebenezer clearly does not like Christmas, so I'm guessing he's not going to be watching
this video, humbug! But for those of us who just love the season I give you a traditional
Dickensian Christmas pudding. So thank you to CuriosityStream for sponsoring this video as we look at a Christmas tradition steeped in history, myth, and most importantly brandy. Christmas pudding, this time on Tasting History. Now there are recipes for plum pudding or figgy
pudding which are pretty much the same thing dating all the way back to the 1600s, but what
I wanted to find was a pudding that's actually called a Christmas pudding, and the first recipe
I could find came from the 1837 American cookbook "The Housekeeper's Book", but that's not the one that
i'm using today because just a few years later in 1845 Eliza Acton published her seminal work "Modern
Cookery for Private Families", and the reason that I'm using that one is because someone on Instagram
sent me an early edition of the book. It smells amazing, does anyone else do that? I don't know.
I love the smell of books, um so the fact that I like have this, how could I not use it. So
thank you Joshua for sending me this, my first early edition cookbook of any kind. The Author's Christmas Pudding To three ounces of flour, and the same weight of fine, lightly-grated bread-crumbs, add six of beef kidney suet, chopped small, six of raisins weighed after they are stoned, six of
well-cleaned currants, four ounces of minced apples five of sugar, two of candied orange-rind, mace half a teaspoon full of nutmeg mixed with pounded mace, a very little salt, a small glass of brandy, and
three whole eggs. Mix and beat these ingredients well together, tie them tightly in a thickly
floured cloth and boil them for three hours and a half, we can recommend this as a remarkably
light small rich pudding: it may be served with German, wine, or punch sauce. So this pudding is
made with a traditional pudding cloth rather than a basin which would be more commonly used today because it's A LOT easier, so much can go wrong with a pudding cloth. As is seen by my first
abysmal attempt. So feel free to use a basin if you want, there will be no judgement on my part, but even a cloth is better than what would have been used to make puddings in the Middle Ages which was the stomach of an animal, so yay cloth. Now what you'll need is: 3 ounces or 85 grams of flour, 3 ounces or 85 grams of bread crumbs, 6 ounces or 170 grams of beef suet. Now beef suet is the protective fat
around the kidneys and liver of a cow and it's going to be pretty much impossible for you to
find if you're living in the United States. Other countries you're probably going to find it, not in
the U.S. But you can go ahead and use either lard or Crisco because they're going to melt at about
the same temperature close enough. Butter actually will work as well, despite the fact that it's going
to melt at a lower temperature. 6 ounces or 170 grams of stoned raisins. So these are actually the
'plums' in plum pudding. Until recently in England plum just meant any dried fruit, so these are
the plums. They wouldn't have actually had plums in the plum pudding. So plum pudding, figgy pudding, Christmas pudding, all the same thing. 6 ounces or 170 grams of currants, 4 ounces or 113 grams of
minced apples, 5 ounces or 142 grams of brown sugar , 2 ounces or 57 grams of candied peel, one half teaspoon of nutmeg with a little mace mixed in, a pinch of salt, 3 ounces or 88 milliliters of brandy. She's not very specific actually on how much to use, so I used three ounces but you can
use more or less, we're going to be adding a lot more later on so it's up to you. And three eggs. So the first thing you've got to do is prepare your pudding cloth. You're going to want something made out of either calico or muslin. Cheesecloth is not going to work for this. A piece about 3 by 3 feet is going to be more than ample for this size pudding. Boil it for 20 minutes. While that boils get a large bowl and add in all of your pudding ingredients. ♪ Now bring us some figgy pudding, now bring us some piggy pudding ♪ Then mix everything well together, and set it
aside until your cloth is ready. After 20 minutes of boiling take the cloth out of the water, and lay it on a flat surface. Now to quote Chef Louis from The Little Mermaid "It's gonna be hot in that big
silver pot." So I suggest using gloves and or tongs. Now Eliza Acton says to just flour the cloth,
and in theory that should work, but in practice... yeah... :/ Luckily Queen Victoria's own chef Charles
Francatelli deigning to write for the working classes, says that it should be a well greased
and floured cloth. And I can tell you it's going to work better. So with a bit of suet, or lard, or
butter, grease the cloth and then rub the flour in. You're not going to over-flour the cloth so don't
be shy. Then line a medium bowl with the cloth flour side-up, and forming your pudding mixture
into a ball place it in the bowl. Then gather up the cloth around it and give it a tight twist
trying to leave no room around the pudding. Then wrap a piece of string or another piece of cloth
(don't use twine for this) around the twist and tie it as tight as possible. Then put another pot of
water on the stove and place a small plate upside down on the bottom. This will keep the pudding
from burning. Then heat the water to a rolling boil. Once it's boiling, and not before, pick up
your pudding and give it one last shaping. You're going for a perfect cannonball shape, but
it's a lot harder than than it looks. I did not get that. Then set it in the water and cover
the pot. Now today it's more common to just steam a pudding, so you'd only need like an inch of
water and you're kind of good to go and you just watch it and make sure it doesn't boil away but since we're boiling this pudding the water needs to come up fairly high at least halfway up the pudding. It's a lot harder but that's the way it's done. Now that plate that we put on the
bottom is going to be rattling around as long as the water is boiling, so as long as you're hearing
that wonderful rattling then you are good to go, and don't need to add more boiling water. Charles Dickens actually mentioned this wonderful sound in A Christmas carol. "...the two young Cratchits hustled
Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the wash-house, that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper." If the singing stops, and actually before the singing stops, you really need to add more water and it
needs to be boiling water straight from the kettle. Don't add room temperature water because
it's going to lower everything and it it's not good. Make sure the water is boiling. Now this pudding only boils for three and a half hours, which is nothing compared to the huge
puddings that might have to boil for eight hours, but even three and a half hours is plenty of time
to sneak in a documentary. Which is exactly what I did as I worried the last time that i was making
this pudding to see if it turned out all right. I distracted myself with an excellent documentary
from today's sponsor: CuriosityStream. Whether it's on your phone, laptop or smart tv, there are endless
opportunities for an educational distraction via the thousands of documentaries available on CuriosityStream. History, science, nature, travel, all of my favorite things in one place. My mom actually
bought my dad a subscription for his birthday, so with Christmas coming up maybe that's a good gift
you could give someone. You can sign up using the link in the description below, and if you use the code ‘TASTINGHISTORY’
you get an entire year for just $14.99. Now after a couple documentaries
or three and a half hours to be precise, go ahead and remove the pudding from the pot and set it in
a bowl for a few minutes to let most of the water drain. Then hang it to fully dry. Now it's supposed
to age in a cold dry place but I live in LA, so that's not going to happen. So I actually
took the pudding once it dried out of the cloth, and put it into an airtight container and
stored it in the refrigerator for a few weeks. And a few weeks is plenty of time to talk about
the history of Christmas pudding. It's not going to take a few weeks, I promise. *Puts on History Hat if he had one* Now the origin of plum
pudding, as is its association with Christmas, is a little murky and that's because a lot of what we
know about the traditions of Christmas around the Middle Ages and the Renaissance actually come from the Victorians who were famous for just making stuff up, and even today it's kind of hard to tell
fact from fiction sometimes. I have been taken in by those dastardly Victorians on several occasions but what we do know is that at least by the 16th century the English were celebrating Christmas
with copious amounts of alcohol-induced revelry wassailing from house to house and feasting
on rich foods such as mince pies. This is when mincemeat was actually still meat. Might make for a
very good episode actually. They also ate something called plum porridge. A proto-plum pudding if
you will. But then came the war on Christmas. The actual war on Christmas. When in 1644 the Puritan led
English Parliament banned Christmas celebrations as "recalling the sins of our forefathers, who have turned this Feast, pretending the memory of Christ into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights..." Sounds like a nice Christmas to me. Anyway these killjoys of English history ended up doubling down a few years later when they decided that all shops had
to remain open on Christmas day. There are even stories that town criers were sent out the night before ringing bells and shouting
"No Christmas! No Christmas! No Christmas!" Now luckily that original
act was abolished in 1660 when the monarchy was restored, but it actually took centuries for
Christmas to get back to the grand holiday that it once was. But one of the first traditions that
we do see return to the holiday was the eating of rich foods specifically plum and figgy pudding. And in the 17th and 18th centuries England started to spread itself around the globe, plum puddings were
a perfect way to celebrate with those people who might be thousands of miles away because you could
send them a Christmas pudding in June and when it finally got there in december it was still good
to eat. In an 1887 article in Good Housekeeping, just after that magazine started, it's been around
for a while, there's a story about a Colonel Hazard who went on holiday and he was gone for two years
during which a plum pudding had been delivered to his house and it just sat there for two years and
when he got back he boiled it. Afterwards musing "...that a good plum pudding, like the wheat found in
the old Egyptian mummy cases, would keep all right for a thousand years." Now as plum puddings followed
soldiers across the sea and around the globe the pudding came to symbolize the British empire
itself. Specifically in political cartoons of the day. One famous cartoon called "The Plum Pudding in
Danger" shows William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte carving up a plum pudding globe. Britain getting
a noticeably larger slice. And then plum pudding got its big Christmas break when in 1843, less than
10 years after England finally made it an official bank holiday, Charles Dickens forever solidified
the desserts association with Christmas by giving us a lovely description of it at the Cratchit
house. "Hello! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastry-cook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered - flushed but smiling proudly - with the pudding, like a speckled cannonball so hard and firm, blazing in half a quarter of ignited brandy cannonball so hard and firm blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top." I just love
that excerpt but I do think it's weird to describe the smell as like a laundress. I mean I would never
want a cake that was considered Downy fresh but you know it's the 19th century, I guess. Also, I have decided to bring back the word bedight which means adorned. So next time you need to use the word
adorned, which is often i'm sure, make sure to use the word bedight. Let's bring it back. Now it was soon after A Christmas Carol was published that we start to see a lot of the modern traditions
around the Christmas pudding starting to crop u. Some people think that it should be made with 13
ingredients to symbolize Jesus and the 12 apostles, and some think that it should have coins and other
choking hazards cooked inside as little prizes for good luck, but the most famous tradition is that
it needs to be made on the last Sunday before advent called Stir-up Sunday because in the Book
of Common Prayer the collect of the day says "Stir up we beseech thee o Lord, the wills of thy
faithful people." Then everyone goes home and takes a turn stirring the Christmas pudding clockwise, which come to think of it I don't think I did so that's not good. :x And the reason for making
it so far in advance is because supposedly after a month of aging the flavors really come to life.
Even Charles Dickens himself said "...puddings will keep good for several months, and only require
to be boiled for an hour at the time of serving." And that's why I actually made my Christmas
pudding way back in October so that today it can have aged for about a month. And now it's
time to reboil our pudding. So lets do it. So on Christmas day, or filming day in my case, you just
go ahead and re-wrap that pudding and basically do exactly what you did. Either boil or you can
steam it for about an hour just to you know get it nice and warm again. wine Now Eliza Acton says
that you can serve this with either a German, wine, or punch sauce. You don't have to but you can and
I actually ended up making the punch sauce that is in the book so I have put that recipe it's fairly
easy put that recipe down in the description if you want to make it. But you could also use
like a nice custard it's a lot prettier because sauces in her book they're very
liquidy because they're extremely, extremely alcoholic. Aand speaking of alcoholic that seems
to be a hallmark of the Christmas pudding. Our recipe of course had brandy in it. Other recipes
have you soak the fruit in brandy before putting them into the mixture and others have you pour
brandy over it every few days while it's aging but all of them basically say afterward
you put a little brandy on or around it that's the tradition and then you light it
on fire which brings us to some more history (It's back!) So there was a game associated with the brandy
called snapdragon or flap dragon as Shakespeare called it, and Samuel Johnson defines it thus "A play in which they catch raisins out of a burning brandy, and extinguishing them by closing the
mouth, eat them." And in the 1709 magazine Tattler, Richard Steel says "The wantonness of the
thing was to see each other look like a demon, as we burnt ourselves, and snatched out the fruit." So at first it was just a bowl of brandy but then as soon as puddings became a thing they started
making a little moat of brandy around the pudding and took them out of there and by the 19th century
there was actually a little song associated with the game. "With his blue and lapping tongue
Many of you will be stung Snip! Snap! Dragon! For he snaps at all that comes
snatching at his feast of plums, Snip! Snap! Dragon! There are actually a bunch more verses so you can look them up if you want. Also in one of my favorite books ever "Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There" by Lewis Carroll
there's a creature called the snapdragon fly. "It's body is made of plum pudding, its wings of holly
leaves and its head is a raisin burning in brandy." Crazy dangerous holiday game. I do not suggest
you do it especially when you learn that this was actually a children's game. Oh those crazy Brits. Now let's light this thing on fire shall we? And here's our Christmas pudding. Now I put a
little sprig of fake holly in there. I wouldn't use real holly, because it is poisonous. Granted
you're not going to probably be eating it but you know what why why risk it so use use fake holly
if you need to. Also if you're going to light this on fire please remove the holly. I tried it first
using the punch sauce that i made but it couldn't light so I ended up using just plain brandy and
voila, gorgeous. Now kids do not try this at home and if you are going to do it make sure you
have like a pot or something that you can snuff it out with otherwise it will end up like
burning the uh the fruit and it doesn't smell good... because we let it burn too long. So I'm
going to slice myself off a piece here. I think a little bit of liquid might have gotten
in there because it should hold together a little bit more firm. Mine kind of crumbled but still
looks pretty good so let's add a bit of this sauce, and give it a try. That's alcoholic. It's really good, it's really raisiny. I mean
i guess that's why it's called plum pudding because that is the flavor that you're getting. If
you don't like raisins you're not gonna like this. If you don't like brandy you're not gonna like
this, but if you like raisins and brandy you're gonna like this. It's just so much fun! The texture
is really nice. It's not stodgy or anything but it's not dry it's not too moist. It's really
kind of perfect, yeah. It's a lot of work though and a lot of calories so there's actually a wonderful
saying from the 19th century that says "Fair Girl be warned when Christmas comes, reject that pudding stuffed with plums." But I for one am not going to reject this pudding. In fact i'm going to eat
the rest of this piece right now. So make sure to follow me on Instagram @ tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
This is my favorite video I’ve done yet. Something about the difficulty and the music made it so much for to do.
Awesome, I can't wait to try this! Did any of the old recipes mention Brandy Butter? Gives you an excuse to add even more brandy..
I’ve been looking forward to Christmas season for this very reason!
What is German? That was an option to put on it. Also I love the ever changing pikachu in the back!
Max I'm a huge fan of your channel, I'm a big cooking nerd. My 10 year old son is a big history buff as well, so we made a pudding the other day for Christmas. (I couldn't find suet so I subbed lard) I'll see what happens! Keep up the videos! You're great
TL;DR: Try clarified butter or ghee.
Long version: Due to the pandemic, my Christmas celebrations have been delayed this year. I'm turning my lemons into lemonade by making this for upcoming celebrations - a Christmas in January, if you will. I found beef suet from a butcher near my area and had to render it into tallow myself (pregnant wife was non too thrilled, but is humoring me). However, after some research, I found that clarified butter or ghee would likely make good substitutes. This is a little technical but something I found fascinating.
The smoke point is what matters - that is, the temperature at which the fat begins to break down. Beef suet, or tallow, has a smoke point of around 390o F, whereas ghee has a smoke point of 492o F. This would mean the pudding would have to cook longer, but you'd have the spongy texture that the dish needs. Clarified butter smokes at 486o. Putting that down on text makes it sound to hot to get to for something like this, but it certainly would do the trick.
The reason I mention it is that clarified butter can be made on the stove top by simmering regular butter that most people would already have in the fridge. For reference - regular butter smokes at 350o and lard smokes at 370o. It would be interesting to try the difference between clarified butter and tallow. Might be something I burden my family with next year. :D