Ye Olde British Christmas recipes?
November 28, 2010 8:11 AM Subscribe
Recommendations for ye olde British Christmas cookbook?
My friends and I have a bizarre hankering for homemade mincemeat pies, Christmas pudding, Yorkshire pudding, and other Victorian Christmas delights despite being Americans. We have access to good fresh suet and other "exotic" ingredients, so we are appalled by recipes that call for vegetable shortening. We want the real stuff and based on what I know about "curing" Christmas puddings, we should start soon. Surely there is a cookbook or website that has truly traditional British Christmas recipes?
My friends and I have a bizarre hankering for homemade mincemeat pies, Christmas pudding, Yorkshire pudding, and other Victorian Christmas delights despite being Americans. We have access to good fresh suet and other "exotic" ingredients, so we are appalled by recipes that call for vegetable shortening. We want the real stuff and based on what I know about "curing" Christmas puddings, we should start soon. Surely there is a cookbook or website that has truly traditional British Christmas recipes?
Project Gutenberg. Go to advanced search on the left sidebar, enter "Cooking, English" under subject, and you'll get ten or eleven 19th century English cookbooks.
(I'd give you a link, but the search results don't seem to have distinctive links.)
posted by Ahab at 8:31 AM on November 28, 2010
(I'd give you a link, but the search results don't seem to have distinctive links.)
posted by Ahab at 8:31 AM on November 28, 2010
If you want some approachable modern recipes:
Delia Smith is hugely popular over here and bought out a revised Christmas cookbook Delia's Happy Christmas last year. You'll find recipes for homemade mincemeat, Christmas pudding, mince pies, Christmas cake (no Yorkshire pudding, I'm afraid, not really part of a traditional Christmas, but here's a recipe for that too).
I'm also a fan of Nigella Lawson's Christmas book. She's particularly good at mentioning how far in advance you can make things and how long they'll keep in the fridge/freezer. She's a bit more modern than Delia there are a lot more influences from other cultures (US and Italian, predominantly).
posted by dogsbody at 8:34 AM on November 28, 2010 [3 favorites]
Delia Smith is hugely popular over here and bought out a revised Christmas cookbook Delia's Happy Christmas last year. You'll find recipes for homemade mincemeat, Christmas pudding, mince pies, Christmas cake (no Yorkshire pudding, I'm afraid, not really part of a traditional Christmas, but here's a recipe for that too).
I'm also a fan of Nigella Lawson's Christmas book. She's particularly good at mentioning how far in advance you can make things and how long they'll keep in the fridge/freezer. She's a bit more modern than Delia there are a lot more influences from other cultures (US and Italian, predominantly).
posted by dogsbody at 8:34 AM on November 28, 2010 [3 favorites]
I'd vote for Nigella because her recipes work and the stuff tastes good. Our ancestors must have had different tastebuds, I think.
Dicken's grandson has written extensively about foods of the past.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:10 AM on November 28, 2010
Dicken's grandson has written extensively about foods of the past.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:10 AM on November 28, 2010
Best answer: You want Jane Grigson's English Food, specifically her recipe for the king of suet puddings, Sussex Pond Pudding. Mrs Grigson describes it as 'The best of all English boiled suet puddings. In the middle the butter and sugar melt to a rich sauce, which is sharpened with the juice from the lemon. The genius of the pudding is the lemon. Its citrus bitter flavour is a subtlety which raises the pudding to the highest class.'
Warning: it is advisable to finish this pudding at a single sitting to avoid the unnerving discovery, when you open the fridge door the following day, that the high fat concentration has turned the remains pure white.
posted by verstegan at 9:34 AM on November 28, 2010 [2 favorites]
Warning: it is advisable to finish this pudding at a single sitting to avoid the unnerving discovery, when you open the fridge door the following day, that the high fat concentration has turned the remains pure white.
posted by verstegan at 9:34 AM on November 28, 2010 [2 favorites]
My family swears by the Be-Ro book - and even better, most of the recipes you want are online:
Christmas Pudding (Storage: in pudding bowl, with foil over the top and an elastic band to give a better seal, just about anywhere)
Christmas Cake. Ignore the bit about putting the paste on - one cooked and cooled, wrap in tinfoil, open tinfoil every week, stab cake and add a generous slosh of brandy, and re-wrap.
Nigella and Delia are also good bets - we use the mincemeat recipe from Delia Smith's Christmas, which you can get online here.
Truly traditional is a very interesting concept though - figgy pudding is a classic Victorian Christmas dish, but almost no-one now eats it. And if you go further back, well, those mince pies should have meat in them as well as the fruit!
posted by Coobeastie at 9:49 AM on November 28, 2010 [1 favorite]
Christmas Pudding (Storage: in pudding bowl, with foil over the top and an elastic band to give a better seal, just about anywhere)
Christmas Cake. Ignore the bit about putting the paste on - one cooked and cooled, wrap in tinfoil, open tinfoil every week, stab cake and add a generous slosh of brandy, and re-wrap.
Nigella and Delia are also good bets - we use the mincemeat recipe from Delia Smith's Christmas, which you can get online here.
Truly traditional is a very interesting concept though - figgy pudding is a classic Victorian Christmas dish, but almost no-one now eats it. And if you go further back, well, those mince pies should have meat in them as well as the fruit!
posted by Coobeastie at 9:49 AM on November 28, 2010 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: those mince pies should have meat in them as well as the fruit!
Yes, exactly. I bought a whole lamb and have plenty of tallow and suet lying around, so I'm hoping to make use of it. I want to go old old school. I like the 16th century recipes, but I'm not always clear on things like "take the fattest of the broath of powdred beefe."
posted by melissam at 10:04 AM on November 28, 2010
Yes, exactly. I bought a whole lamb and have plenty of tallow and suet lying around, so I'm hoping to make use of it. I want to go old old school. I like the 16th century recipes, but I'm not always clear on things like "take the fattest of the broath of powdred beefe."
posted by melissam at 10:04 AM on November 28, 2010
I just had a closer look at the gutenberg stuff. They've got books going all the way back to the 14th Century. That's old old school..
But you're right about the interpretation. That one's not listed as being in English, but Middle English.
posted by Ahab at 10:59 AM on November 28, 2010
But you're right about the interpretation. That one's not listed as being in English, but Middle English.
posted by Ahab at 10:59 AM on November 28, 2010
Grigson's exactly the right territory, I think. You might also enjoy Fanny Cradock's Christmas series on the YouTubes. Delia is an institution, of course, but she represents a new era of television cookery; Fanny's got one foot in the past, and a couple of toes on the continent. Nigel Slater's all about the modern, but his Christmas standards are all about tradition.
The thing to remember about English Christmas cookery, though, is that it's hugely dependent upon the literal fruits of empire: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice; citrus, currants, sultanas, figs. Even the turkey: it's all "exotic" stuff.
The BBC has adapted Victorian recipes for the pud and the bird. You might be too late for Christmas cake, and pushing it for Christmas pud: by this time of year, my late grandma's cakes were into their second month of being tended with spirits.
posted by holgate at 11:21 AM on November 28, 2010
The thing to remember about English Christmas cookery, though, is that it's hugely dependent upon the literal fruits of empire: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice; citrus, currants, sultanas, figs. Even the turkey: it's all "exotic" stuff.
The BBC has adapted Victorian recipes for the pud and the bird. You might be too late for Christmas cake, and pushing it for Christmas pud: by this time of year, my late grandma's cakes were into their second month of being tended with spirits.
posted by holgate at 11:21 AM on November 28, 2010
If you want to make a Christmas cake you need to get on it stat. My mother-in-law has been "feeding" her cake with brandy for weeks now.
posted by lhall at 11:32 AM on November 28, 2010
posted by lhall at 11:32 AM on November 28, 2010
Since in your question you specified Victorian...no one does (British) Christmas like Dickens does Christmas, and you can get a lot of ideas from the contents of his stories. Here's a list of food quotes and one of food quotes specifically from A Christmas Carol. But he wrote a ton of Christmas-themed short stories, listed in full here, from which you might draw inspiration.
posted by lhall at 11:42 AM on November 28, 2010
posted by lhall at 11:42 AM on November 28, 2010
Mrs Beeton's Book Of Household Management is available online in a variety of formats - my link goes to a dedicated webpage that has some of the illustrations as well as the text of the book, but Gutenberg has, I believe, the text. The section under "Puddings" has several recipes for Christmas puddings as well as mince pies.
The doyenne of Victorian cooking, she was nearly a contemporary of Dickens, and that's about as Christmassy as it gets, IMHO. Of course, the recipes will give you very stodgy Victorian cooking and Mrs Beeton "borrowed" quite a large number of her recipes from Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families which doesn't appear to be anywhere online, although you can certainly buy reproduction copies.
posted by ninazer0 at 2:05 PM on November 28, 2010
The doyenne of Victorian cooking, she was nearly a contemporary of Dickens, and that's about as Christmassy as it gets, IMHO. Of course, the recipes will give you very stodgy Victorian cooking and Mrs Beeton "borrowed" quite a large number of her recipes from Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families which doesn't appear to be anywhere online, although you can certainly buy reproduction copies.
posted by ninazer0 at 2:05 PM on November 28, 2010
Not 16th century, but my favourite cookery book that adapts medieval recipies is on google books - Pleyn Delit. You might be able to cross reference that with the recipies you're trying to use?
posted by Coobeastie at 1:04 AM on November 29, 2010
posted by Coobeastie at 1:04 AM on November 29, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by apricot at 8:29 AM on November 28, 2010