Three Victorian Christmas Recipes To Try At Home Including A Potato Pudding

(MENAFN- The Conversation) A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was published in 1843 – the same year as the first Christmas card. Over the course of the 19th century, his depictions of the Christmas turkey and charitable spirit were reprinted thousands of times in Britain and America, cementing the fascination with and commodification of Christmas we are familiar with today.

But what about the food eaten at the Victorian dinner table, beyond the (now) traditional turkey? These three recipes, which are both familiar and different to the Christmas menu we now know and love, show how Christmas foods and traditions were being explored and adapted over the course of the 19th century.

Some recipes were more extravagant than our typical modern Christmas dinner, like the“Yorkshire or Christmas Pie” from The Modern Cook by Charles Elme Francatelli (1846), which featured five different birds (pheasant, partridge, woodcock, snipe and grouse), bacon, tongue and French truffles. Here are three slightly less complicated offerings to try at home.

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From The Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton (1861).

English writer Isabella Beeton's soup essentially involved simmering the bones and leftover meat of your Christmas turkey into an existing stock to enrich it, before using a thickening agent to make it even richer.

Her reference to “Harvey's Sauce” demonstrates how common it was to buy branded, mass-produced foodstuffs by this point in the 19th century. A thin, strong-tasting ketchup flavoured with anchovies, garlic and cayenne, the punchy sauce was the brain-child of culinary expert Peter Harvey in the early 1800s.

It became so popular that it was frequently referenced in Victorian literature. It made a lively addition to any soup or gravy.

Beeton, despite authoring one of the most prolific cookbooks of the Victorian era, compiled recipes and information from other sources in her cookbooks, rather than writing them on her own.

Below this soup recipe, she included an excerpt on the history of turkeys, which she notes were“introduced to England, in the reign of Henry VIII” and were“one of the most difficult birds to rear, of any that we have”. Preparing this soup was therefore a history lesson, as well as a way of using up festive leftovers.

From Bow Bells: A Magazine of General Literature and Family Reading (1893).

This recipe, taken from a popular, London-based periodical that included items of fashion, literature, current events, recipes and domestic advice, is typical of the 19th-century recipe form.

In contrast to Beeton's organised recipe, most recipes came in one or more paragraphs. Victorians had to read the entire piece in order to understand what ingredients and equipment they required.

The recipe also relies on the reader knowing that a“quick” fire meant a fiercely burning fire, ascertaining when the bird was cooked and making gravy without instruction. If you were capable of doing so, you could enjoy an alternative to the ever-popular turkey, alongside those in Scotland and the north of England.

From Modern Cookery, In All Its Branches by Eliza Acton (1845).

English food writer Eliza Acton's book Modern Cookery was highly popular over the 19th century. She introduced structure to her recipes before Beeton, though many claim the latter was the first to organise recipes in a way that's more recognisable to modern readers.

What's most intriguing about this festive recipe, however, is the inclusion of potatoes in the Christmas pudding. The reasons for this are best interpreted through the use of“cottage” in the recipes title, which indicates that this type of pudding might have been made in more rural or working-class areas.

Potatoes are used to bulk up the more expensive flour, as a cheap, relatively flavourless base for the stone fruit and spice that characterise Christmas puddings. Or, like the Scottish goose, it might have been that people who lived in cottages had readier access to potatoes than they would flour, due to the climate where they lived.

The contrast between the inclusion of potatoes and the expensive spices and fruit speaks to the desire, whatever your location or circumstances, to eat special food at Christmas. Food with more flavour, variety and luxurious ingredients than you might eat at other times of the year. Traditional foods were adapted to suit the needs of the cook, but celebration remained at their core.

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