The Christmas pudding’s well-preserved nature—it took a month to get seasoned and could last over a year—meant it could be enjoyed as a taste of home by far-flung soldiers and colonizers. It is soaked in alcohol and allowed to mature for days, weeks, or sometimes up to a year before being served on the holiday table.

French Translation of “Christmas pudding” | Collins English French Translation of “Christmas pudding” | Collins English

A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that. By the end of the 16th century, dried fruit was more plentiful in England and plum pudding made the shift from savory to sweet. Jane Cunningham Croly published a 19th-century recipe for plum pudding contributed to Jennie June's American Cookery Book by the American poet sisters Alice Cary and Phoebe Cary.Pudding predecessors often contained meat, as well as sweet ingredients, and prior to being steamed in a cloth the ingredients may have been stuffed into the gut or stomach of an animal, like haggis or sausages. There is a popular and wholly unsubstantiated myth [ citation needed] that in 1714, George I of Great Britain (sometimes known as the Pudding King) [1] requested that plum pudding be served as part of his royal feast in his first Christmas in England. The name is jocularly associated with the stirring of the Christmas mincemeat, which it was customary to begin making in that week.

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The pudding is very dark, almost black in appearance due to the dark sugars and black treacle in most recipes, and its long cooking time. Some households have their own recipes for Christmas pudding, which may be handed down through families for generations.As plum pudding, it became widespread as a feast dish, not necessarily associated with Christmas, and usually served with beef.

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Fifty years later, England’s first German-born ruler, George I, was styled the “pudding king” after rumors surfaced of his request to serve plum pudding at his first English Christmas banquet.A recent history cheerfully notes that the game of “snap dragons,” in which children compete to pluck raisins from the flaming brandy, likely has origins with the Celtic Druids. The Oxford English Dictionary cites this use as early as 1653 by John Lilburne and also, inter alia, in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of 1755. One of the earliest plum pudding recipes is given by Mary Kettilby in her 1714 book A Collection of above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery.