6 Puddings You Hear A Lot About During The Holidays (2024)
It seems like you can’t read a Yuletide tale or sing a carol without the mention of one particular pudding or another. But just where do these festive desserts come from and what’s inside of them?
We decided to uncover some of December’s sweetest treats that you’ve undoubtedly heard about, even if you’ve never seen or tasted them. So let’s get the most obvious one out of the way first.
1. Christmas Pudding
We start with the grandaddy of all December delectables: the appropriately named Christmas pudding. Also known as plum pudding, this dish is a staple of British Christmas dinner but has become popular in several of their former colonies as well.
This magical blend of molasses (called treacle in Britain), sugar, spices, and suet (i.e. cow fat) gets steamed and then covered in brandy before being set on fire as a popular holiday centerpiece.
“Now bring us some figgy pudding” is the well-known refrain of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas." So, here it is.
This seasonal favorite is essentially the same as a Christmas pudding but with the sweet addition of – wait for it – figs. It’s a perfect twist on the classic flavor and allows you to maintain the flaming pizzazz of the original.
3. Black Pudding
If you’re on the subject of puddings this holiday season, you might do yourself and your loved ones a favor and skip over black pudding. While it’s pretty standard breakfast staple in several European countries, blood sausage is still a hard sell in America.
Using dried pigs blood, barley or oatmeal, and a blend of spices, wheat flour, and hog fats, this conspicuously colored “pudding” is an excellent source of iron—but a terrible choice for holiday cheer.
4. Bread Pudding
This dessert is one pudding that has made its way stateside, and we’re all the better for it. Mixing stale bread in a suspension of milk, cream, eggs, and butter makes this dish equal parts creamy and hearty. Throw in sugar and spice and dried fruit (esp. raisins) and you’ve got a winning combination.
5. Banana Pudding
If you’re hearing this request, it’s probably from a toddler, and he or she probably wants the instant variety served with a few Nilla Wafers. But the fancy-pants, original concoction is no slouch either.
First off, the pudding should be sweet vanilla flavored custard separated by layers of ladyfinger or vanilla wafer cookies topped with fresh sliced bananas and whipped cream or meringue. It’s enough to make you go ape!
6. Sticky Toffee Pudding
Again, the English have very different definition of pudding. Or maybe we do. Like the Christmas pudding and figgy puddings before it, the sticky toffee pudding is usually steamed for maximum moisture.
Instead of figs, however, very finely chopped dates are added to the cake, which gets covered in a toffee sauce. And, yes, toffee sauce is the warm, liquid, org*sm-in-your-mouth flavor of melted British toffee. Custard and ice cream are optional additions but come highly recommended.
It's made with alcohol and dried fruit and is a traditional English dessert. It's more like a cake than what Americans think of as a soft, custard-like pudding. Figgy pudding is also known as Christmas pudding or plum pudding.
It was made as bread pudding, by soaking stale bread in milk then adding suet, candied citron, nutmeg, eggs, raisins and brandy. It was a moulded dessert, cooked in boiling water for several hours, and served with a sweet wine sauce.
At the very least, it dates back to a 16th-century dish known as 'plum pottage'. This version of Christmas pudding contained meat broth to bind all of the ingredients together. However, some trace back the origins of the Christmas pudding as far as the 14th century.
Figgy pudding just might be one of the most talked-about Christmas dishes. Carolers sing “now bring us some figgy pudding!” In “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” and the dish is a centerpiece in Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol,” when Mrs.
Christmas pudding is also called figgy pudding and plum pudding. It's not made with plums, however. It's made with raisins, which were called plums in the Victorian era. Most recipes suggest soaking the raisins in brandy overnight, which I did.
Although it is highly unlikely the dessert would still be edible after 120 years – despite “high-class ingredients only” inside – the tin still features instructions for preparation, as well as a message which reads: “For the Naval Brigade, In the Front, With Miss Weston's Best Christmas & New Year, 1900, Wishes.”
It wasn't until the mid-seventeenth century that this pudding became associated with Christmas which led to it being banned in 1647 by Oliver Cromwell who believed that it and other festive traditions led to drunken revelry instead of sombre reflection.
We often say the main thing a White Pudding and a Black Pudding have in common is the word 'Pudding'. A Black Pudding is made with Blood, generally Pigs Blood, but can also be made with Oxen, Goose, Duck, Venison. A White Pudding is made with Pork and Bacon….
Can children eat Christmas pudding for having an alcoholic content? Yes. Many foods have traces of alcohol (Ethanol) and many other alcohols can be present in trace amounts. The volume of alcohol in Christmas pudding is not high, even when flambeed and served with Brandy butter or a whisky sauce.
A rich, dark Christmas pudding recipe packed with boozy fruits, spices and nuts. Serve with brandy butter, whipped cream or vanilla ice-cream to end your Christmas meal in style.
Food historians generally agree the first puddings made by ancient cooks produced foods similar to sausages. The British claim pudding as part of their culinary heritage. Medieval puddings (black and white) were still mostly meat-based.
You'll no doubt be familiar with the act of adding silver coins into Christmas pudding. This tradition came from the notion that whoever finds the coin in their pudding serve can keep the coin, AND has the added bonus of “good luck” for the new year ahead.
A silver sixpence was placed into the pudding mix and every member of the household gave the mix a stir. Whoever found the sixpence in their own piece of the pudding on Christmas Day would see it as a sign that they would enjoy wealth and good luck in the year to come.
You can't get through the Christmas season without hearing about it, but have you ever stopped wondering what figgy pudding is? In Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, you read that Mrs. Cratchit proudly presented to her guests her Christmas pudding, resembling a speckled cannonball.
Dinner at Cratchit's house ends with a traditional Christmas pudding, which Dickens describes as “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.” Sometimes called plum pudding, Christmas pudding is made with dried ...
Traditional figgy pudding is a holiday dish made with flour, suet (a type of hard animal fat), figs, and other dried fruits. Some more modern versions, like this one, are made without suet. Here's what you'll need for this top-rated figgy pudding recipe: Buttermilk.
Figgy pudding or fig pudding is any of many medieval Christmas dishes, usually sweet or savory cakes containing honey, fruits and nuts. In later times, rum or other distilled alcohol was often added to enrich the fruitiness of the flavour. Figgy pudding. Type.
Introduction: My name is Mrs. Angelic Larkin, I am a cute, charming, funny, determined, inexpensive, joyous, cheerful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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