The French begin their festive meal after midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Known as le reveillon – “the awakening” – it typically involves a generous number of courses including oysters, foie gras and a capon (a castrated cockerel). Aside from a log of buche de Noel, which rounds off the feast, there is nothing particularly distinctive about most of its dishes – they represent luxuriously good food in abundant quantity. Why would a nation of gourmets limit their best foods to a more one day a year?
The menu for a Christmas Day dinner in Britain is distinctive from other countries not in the particulars of its flavours but the rigidity of its formula. The bill of fare these days – turkey, stuffing, pudding – is a legacy for the Victorians, particularly Charles Dickens. The enormous turkey that Scrooge sent the Cratchit family at the end of “A Christmas Carol” assured the bird’s long-term dominance over other meats such as goose. The family’s home-made sage-and-onion stuffing has become the default accompaniment to the meat – and is now product on an industrial scale.
Plum pudding, with its flaming brandy cap and holly garnish, became the crowning glory of a British Christmas meal and a true marker of identity (one that continues to befuddle many visitors from afar).
That Christmas meal came of age in Britain in an era of empire, and the Cratchits' dinner was soon exported. Britons brandished their puddings wherever they went: a sugary statement of imperial confidence. In the 1920s the Empire Marketing Board, which promoted trade within the empire, launched a campaign encouraging housewives who were making the sticky Christmas dessert to use only colonial ingredients: currants from Australia, candied peel from South Africa, rum from Jamaica, sugar from the West Indies, cloves from Zanzibar, cinnamon from India. As well as promoting imperial unity, the “Empire Pudding" campaign was also a riposte to upstart raisin exporters from California.
Christmas puddings and full roast dinners were dished up in all climates: for years Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans sweated through such meals even in their mid-summer heat. As a concession to the swelter of Christmas in the southern hemisphere, the meal might sometimes be enjoyed in the form of a picnic. The roast could even be eaten cold. But by golly there would be a pud. A missionary in east-central Africa in the late 19th century describes serving a pudding, burning “brandily and bluely". In many countries the tradition continued long after the British flag had fallen.
