This is the time of year when assorted versions of Dickens' seasonal masterpiece A Christmas Carol vie for space on TV and streaming services. I am reading the novel again and recently reached the description of the Cratchit family's Christmas pudding singing in the wash-house copper as it cooked. And when it emerged from that unusual vessel, what a pudding it was! A positive prince of puddings!
Dickens describes the scene: "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 pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding!...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."
While at one time the Reed family lived in a Victorian era flat still retaining its wash copper in a corner of the scullery, we did not cook our Christmas puddings in the same fashion. No, they were steamed in a basin wrapped in a tea towel set in a large pan, so we were familiar with the steamy smell invoked by the extract above. On the other hand, the Cratchit's pudding most likely did not conceal a lucky coin as ours always did, perhaps a sixpenny piece or if not a pre-decimal penny wrapped in greaseproof paper. We kids understood this precaution was intended to avoid poisoning someone at the festive table, because whereas sixpences were made of silver, the old penny was manufactured from a baser metal and so considered dangerous to everyone's health.
Mind you, while you had to be careful of your teeth, the lucky diner whose pudding portion turned out to contain the coin was guaranteed good luck in the coming year. Round our way, it was rumoured those who did not possess a big enough pan in which to boil their puddings would employ a bucket. Which reminds me that some years ago we sampled a cylindrical because tinned Christmas pudding. In flavour it wasn't too bad, in appearance it just wasn't quite right somehow.
On the other hand, lack of a coin in the pudding would not be surprising given Bob Cratchit took home, as Dickens puts it, fifteen copies of his Christian name a week, and he with a wife and several children to support. However, we are perhaps safe in visualising the Cratchit children giving the pudding mixture a good stir apiece while making a wish in the good old traditional way.
Our Christmas pudding arrived at the table sans holly and brandy, as did other familiar steamed puddings such as spotted dick or those featuring a treacle, syrup, or jam base. Covered in piping hot custard, all were common fare for working folks' "afters" and even occasionally made an appearance in school dinners. Treacle pudding was my favourite anywhere I went, although until writing this I had not found reason to reflect on the number of pans the school's kitchen staff must have employed to supply enough puddings for all their young diners. Alas, no custard was served with them, so it was always a case of naked came the treacle pudding.
Returning to Dickens, despite supernatural intervention, the sea change Scrooge underwent is all the more remarkable given early in the novel he emphatically states if he could work his 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!”
As for interpretations of Scrooge, my vote goes to Alistair Sim. Subscribers may prefer other performances but let us at least be civil in our disagreements. Therefore there is to be no sharpening of holly branches if you please.
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