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Charles Dickens & Christmas Pudding

Plum Pudding Mrs Beeton Colour
View examples from books in the University of Leeds Cookery Collection illustrating the stories behind some traditional Christmas dishes, and look at the variety of ways in which people have celebrated Christmas over the centuries.
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Triumphs and Trophies, Robert May
Robert May's description of a Christmas Party
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Mince Pyes of Stinking Meat
Mince pie recipe - stinking meat
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Vegetarian Christmas Recipes 1914
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Rotherham Food Advisory Bureau Christmas Recipes
Second World War home front Christmas
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Plum Pudding Mrs Beeton Colour
Origins of the Christmas Pudding
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First Christmas pudding recipe
Recipe for earliest ancestor of Christmas Pudding
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Hannah Glasse recipe for Plum Porridge.
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James Gillray 'Plumb-pudding in danger' cartoon.
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The plum pudding becomes a Christmas dish.
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Christmas Pudding T-Shirt
The ubiquity of the Christmas pudding today
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The idea of plum pudding as a Christmas dish rose to prominence during the Victorian period, as seen in A Christmas Carol (published in 1843) shown in this illustration of the Ghost of Christmas Present from the first edition.

That Dickens saw the pudding as a unifying dish and a central symbol of Christmas cheer and plenty, is shown in his description of the Cratchit’s Christmas pudding:

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.
Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage.

An 1850 London Illustrated news article also describes its prominence in similar terms:

The Plum pudding is a national symbol – It does not represent a class or caste, but the bulk of the English nation. There is not a man, woman or child raised above what the French would call proletaires that does not expect a taste of plum pudding of some sort or another on Christmas Day.

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