I went to this fascinating lecture at the Linnean Society last week, given by Angela Dixon, a former lecturer and journalist and a volunteer guide at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. The lecture covered the history of our familiar Christmas treat as well as the origin of its key ingredients.
First of all, the pudding. Boiling food for hours in an animal intestine or fabric bag was a very early way of preserving food. Other examples are the haggis and its sweet cousin, the clootie dumpling. The first recipe recognisable as a Christmas pudding came in the mid 18th century, from Helen Bullock, a settler in Virginia. The ingredients were familiar but the amounts were heroic – her plum pudding recipe calls for 1 lb of each dried fruit and of sugar, 12 eggs, a pint of brandy and half a pound of each type of citrus fruit peel! But why plum pudding, when it contains no plums? Johnson’s dictionary has as its second definition of plum “a grape dried in the sun; a raisin.”. Simple, really. I’m not sure when it lost that meaning – anyone know?
As to the ingredients …
The grape vine originated in the Caucasus area and was domesticated at least 8000 years ago. Sultanas come from white grapes and currants from small black grapes – these came from an island off the west coast of Greece and were exported from Corinth. The word “currant” comes from raisin de Corinthe.
We get nutmeg and mace from Grenada; they amount to about 90% of that island’s GDP. However, they are originally from the Banda islands in the Indonesian archipelago. Angela showed a picture of fresh nutmeg, with the mace covering the shell like bright red webbing – very strange. I hadn’t realised that was where mace comes from.
Cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka, where it is coppiced to produce long, straight shoots. The spice comes from the inner bark, which curls in on itself as it dries.
Vanilla is a climbing orchid originally from Mexico; it was called tlilxochitl by the Aztecs and used to flavour chocolate drinks. After the French lost their short lived Mexican empire, they took vanilla to grow in Madagascar; however, they didn’t also take the bee which pollinates the flowers, so all Madagascar’s vanilla is painstakingly pollinated by hand (which is why it costs so much – the second most expensive spice after saffron).
Christmas pudding wouldn’t be Christmas pudding without candied peel. It turns out that the citrus family is an extremely complicated one, with many, many hybrids, and it took until modern times with DNA sequencing to make sense of the family tree. We now know that there are three ancestral species from which all modern citrus fruits are descended: the citron (Citrus medica), the pomelo (Citrus maxima) and the mandarin (Citrus reticulata). They all come form the east: Indochina, southern China & Burma.
And finally, to sugar. I tend to think of sugar cane as coming from the West Indies, but it actually originated in New Guinea. It was brought to Europe by the Knights Hospitalers, who set up home in Cyprus after the fall of Jerusalem. Most of our sugar these days is made from sugar beet; surprisingly (to me), Napoleon played a major role in this development. The process of getting sugar from sugar beet had been developed in Germany in the mid 18th century but hadn’t caught on commercially. However, when the British blockaded French ports during the Napoleonic Wars, it deprived France of sugar from the West Indies and Napoleon knew he had to find a replacement. He set up sugar schools and issued a decree in 1811 compelling farmers to plant sugar beet, resulting in the establishment of large numbers of sugar beet mills. In fact, France is still the world’s largest producer of sugar beet.
I’ve only managed to convey a fraction of the story – there was a lot more. But I’d like to finish by recommeding a visit to the Linnean Society, particularly for the Linnean Society Treasures Tour, which takes in the meeting room, the library and the bomb-proof store room where Carl Linnaeus’ own collection is stored. To see his own copies of his books (with his annotations in preparation for a new edition) as well as a 1st edition of his Systema Naturae (in which he set out his categorisation of all living things, still in use to today) was breathtaking.