Now Bring Us Some Figgy Pudding

Lyn's MacDougall family Plum Pudding, Christmas 2010

The traditional (and seasonally ubiquitous) English caroling song, "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," contains the famous, but mysterious to most Americans, lyrics about "Now bring us some figgy pudding , , , bring it right here . . we won't go until we get some (etc)" Here's a link to a video of the carol, if you need reminding of the words:  Video: We wish you a merry Christmas

Now bring us some figgy pudding? But just what is this figgy pudding, of which we won't go until we get some? It turns out to be just another name for Plum Pudding, or Christmas Pudding, though that won't mean much to most Americans. Also, it may well have neither figs nor plums, which can refer to raisins or currants. 

If, unlike the MacDougalls, you've lost contact with English traditional cuisine, you may not realize that an English pudding is generally a steamed solid doughy dessert, ending up like a hot, moist, crumbly fruit cake served with hard sauce or custard sauce. A key ingredient is suet. 

If you watch that video in the link, of the "We wish you a merry Christmas" song, the song could give us the impression that Caroling was near to the American Halloween "Trick or Treat" tradition:  A way of extorting sweets from residents.

The excerpt below, from the book "Lobscouse & Spotted Dog" (a gastronomic companion to the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian) describes the British navy version of such pudding,, including figs, but the figs are not that typical. And the "Spotted Dog" in the book title is actually just another version of steamed suet pudding, the "Dog" being another word for Dough, along with Dick, Duff, and Dowdy. The pudding is such an important feature of English cuisine that they have many words for it. 

(Most land lubbers use bread crumbs rather than pounded ships biscuit)

You might also find NPR's article helpful, in this link:  NPR - Figgy Pudding
The NPR articles uses a photo of a molded pudding,

rather than the more traditional tied cloth shape, shown in the top photo, of one of Lyn's.  My mother used to use an aluminum steaming mold, but later went to the tied cloth instead.  A mold gives it a better presentation, but it tastes the same.

In Charles Dicken's classic "A Christmas Carol," Ebenezer Scrooge, after proclaiming "Bah!  Humbug!" to his nephew, imprecates:

"If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.  He should!"

And then, in Dicken's familiar story, at the poor Cratchit house, after the extravagant feast of Christmas goose, comes the pudding:

"Hallo! 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 pastrycook’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 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. Mrs. Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing."

If you follow Dancing With The Stars, you may have seen judge Len Goodman coyly refer to a "spotted dick", which you now know to be another name for spotted dog, a type of steamed pudding.

You may dimly recall the Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme riddle about Plum Pudding, though you probably never realized that's what it was about, but it is clear that it contains the rudiments of the recipe for a plum pudding:

(formatted by Virginia Curry)

FDR served Plum Pudding with hard sauce to Winston Churchill at the White House, for Christmas dinner in 1941.

My brother, Donald, took up the pudding boiling mantle (or other cloth) laid down by our late mother Edith, who in turn got it from our Dad's mother, Hannah MacDougall (nee Hirst), from Huddersfield, England, though I was never sure if it was from her English origin, or my Grandfather's Scottish beginnings. Perhaps both.  Don filled in as the family pudding maker for a number of  years.  Alas, Don, and his puddings remain in California, but I trust Lyn to fill the breach, as she has. The top photo, from Christmas 2010, was Lyn's pudding.

Here is Lyn's recipe card, written for her by my mother, for the MacDougall family Plum Pudding, handed down through at least two generations of MacDougall daughters in law. My thanks to Lyn for allowing me to share this here.  It is really her's to share, not mine.

Notice that it has neither plums nor figs.  As explained in the Lobscouse and Spotted Dog excerpt, those are really regional terms for raisins and currants. No "plums" in plum pudding.  Raisins and currants, are what are usually used, along with other candied fruit.  The hard bread crumbs need no marlin spike.

Some of the ingredients are getting hard to find.   Candied fruit is becoming a specialty item.  Suet, the fat around the kidneys, isn't in big demand  Most butchers don't save it.  You have to ask for it.
Suet is underappreciated as a cooking fat, not much different than butter, but with a higher melting point vital for steaming. Suffers from faddish aversion to fat, which is an essential nutrient. Certainly far, far better than the "Crisco" commonly used in pastries   .https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suet

I suppose Donald has my mother's original recipe, probably conveyed orally from Grandma MacDougall, as well as the steaming mold my mother used to use.

"Hard Sauce" may be equally mysterious to many of you. A seeming contradiction in words.  How can a "sauce" be hard?  Hard Sauce is just the totally decadent mixture of sugar and butter.  Take a stick of butter, a bowl and wooden spoon, and add sugar.  You keep adding sugar until it is about as hard as you can get it and still be able to mix it..  Some people use powdered sugar, as we used to when I was a boy.  Now we used granulated sugar, which may be more traditional, and which I prefer.  A "little" vanilla, or rum, if you so choose.  Then, you put the bowl in the refrigerator to harden some more before serving.  When served, you chip out chunks of the hard sauce and mix it in with the plum pudding, where it melts into the whole gooey pudding.

The full photo also shows the bowl of Hard Sauce

So, English pudding is not the gelatin that Americans call pudding, but a far firmer substance, and   the "hard sauce" that goes with it is also harder than you usually think of a "sauce."  Hard pudding:  Hard sauce.

Ruth's family (Canadian - English) used "Bird's Custard" instead of hard sauce.  Bird's Custard is an old commercial eggless custard, developed in 1837, and has become traditional as a pudding topping in many British families.  It comes as a powder that you mix with milk over the stove to make a custard.

You could also use a rum sauce, or even, pour some rum over the pudding.  Or, flame it with brandy, as Mrs. Cratchit did.

Don added this lexicographic note:

"Looking in the mother of all dictionaries, that is to say the Oxford English Dictionary, regarding the word "pudding" I found that there are perhaps two large pages or more of very fine print on the subject. Attempting to summarize a bit, it seems like long ago the word applied to most anything that was boiled in a cloth or a bag or an animals intestine, which would have been fairly common ways for common folk to cook things in the British isles. The word later came to be applied to similar sorts of foods baked in an oven. Fairly recently it has, in England and Scotland at least, come to be a synonym for what we in the USA would call dessert, that is to say, something sweet eaten at the end of a meal. All this accounts for Plum/Christmas/Figgie puddings etc, but fails to explain Yorkshire pudding, which is a rather bland flour and egg batter, poured into a pan of hot fat and baked in an oven which is served with gravy as a sort of appetizer course before the roast beef, potatoes and vegetables come from the kitchen."

"Lobscouse and Spotted Dog" quotes Burns as calling Haggis the "great chieftain of the pudding race." It also opines that "pudding started out on a parallel course with sausage, then veered off in a more farinaceous direction with the addition of grains or porridge, and finally shed its guts altogether in favor of basins and cloths."

I wonder if Yorkshire Pudding may be a snide Norman joke at the expense of the Yorkies: i.e., "what passes for pudding among those Yorkshire yokels."

And speaking of Yorkshire Pudding, that too is a MacDougall family tradition, though Yorkshire Pudding is not a dessert, but is served as a main course accompaniment to roast beef, or just before the beef, as a sort of appetizer (some have suggested, as a way of filling up young stomachs more cheaply than with beef)  but it reminds me of the other Mother Goose nursery rhyme that contains the recipe for Yorkshire Pudding:

Girls and boys, come out to play,

The moon doth shine as bright as day;

Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,

And come with your playfellows into the street.

Come with a whoop, come with a call,

Come with a good will or not at all.

Up the ladder and down the wall,

A halfpenny roll will serve us all.

You find milk, and I'll find flour,

And we'll have a pudding in half an hour.

According to this linked article in Wikipedia , there's even the tune to go with it.

An old English dictum says: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating"  (sometimes stated more briefly as, "The proof is in the pudding"). This has reference perhaps to some form of pudding like plum or "figgy" or perhaps to the precursor sausage from which pudding evolved.  The word "proof is in the sense of "Test.  The test of a pudding is to eat it and see. Indeed.  You just have to try it.

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I originally posted much of this material as a series of annual Christmas season posts on Facebook.  Additional points were added in comments, by me and others.  This blog is a "pudding" of all of that material, tied up, and boiled together.