Collection: Wilkin & Sons Tiptree Christmas Pudding

Christmas Pudding is not the pudding you might expect.

This pudding is very dense and yet moist, like a steamed fruitcake in a sense. It is made with dried fruit, spices, sugar, fat, and often alcohol. Though that is only a description. It falls short of what the end result is when it has been steamed to reach its full glory!

It is a dessert with centuries of history, surrounded by traditions, superstitions, and family rituals.

For clarity, it is known not just as Christmas Pudding. It is also called Plum Pudding (no plums are harmed or included), Figgy pudding (not quite the same), and Boiled pudding.

The origins of this pudding were savory and sweet-and-savory dishes known as pottages. They combined meat or meat stock with dried fruits, grains, wine, and at the time of origin, expensive spices.

A medieval recipe called Fygey, recorded around 1390, included figs, raisins, almonds, ginger, honey, and wine.

Over time, the mixtures became thicker, sweeter, and more fruit-centered. Cooking them in cloth created the familiar rounded pudding.

In the Victorian era, Christmas pudding became firmly established as the centerpiece of the English Christmas dinner's finale.

Charles Dickens helped immortalize the tradition in the instant-bestselling novella “A Christmas Carol” in 1843:

"In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered—flushed, but smiling proudly—with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.”