Tag Archives: English cooking

Recipe Sharing Across the Channel: French Recipe for Plum Pudding

By Lauren Owens

Plum pudding is a classic dish in English cuisine. Indeed, the boiled sweet is one of those cultural markers associated with England, and yet it features ingredients that are not native to England: currants, raisins, nutmeg, and ginger. These ingredients make tangible (and edible)the reach of the British Empire.1 By the eighteenth century, boiling was a cooking trend that had largely died out in continental Europe, yet printed French texts from the nineteenth century show that plum pudding had made its way to France.2 How did knowledge of this dish spread to Europe? I found this document while doing archival research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France Arsenal location in Paris.3 This recipe for plum pudding was in a folder of random culinary recipes. I was looking for medical recipes and remedies, but this folder caught my eye with its contents: recipes for cheese, strawberry syrups, almond cake, and how to conserve vegetables. Finding this folder was a treat while working in the archive. It provided another area of recipe production that I was not actively looking for. 

“Recette pour faire les puddings à l’anglaise: le plum pudding,” Supplément 4: Ms-12728 to à la fin. Ms-15701. Mélanges XVIIe-XVIIIe. Bibliothéque National de France Arsenal, Paris, France. https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/pageCollections.html?col=2#

This recipe shows that knowledge about popular cultural dishes was shared across the pond much earlier than the published texts indicate. This recipe was titled, “recette pour faire les puddings à l’anglaise: le plum pudding,” and follows popular English recipes for the dish.4 However, this record is distinct in two ways. It features two sets of handwriting, showing that someone added to this recipe and altered the ingredients to their tastes. Second, this new author added two spoonfuls of brandy and two spoonfuls of powdered sugar to the recipe while the English recipe uses the natural sweetness of the dried fruit for the sugar content. This source is significant for showing the process of recipe alteration and adaptation. 

I decided to make the pudding at home. My sources often lack specific voices and explanations behind the recipe. This opportunity allowed me to think like the people I study.

“Recette pour faire les puddings à l’anglaise: le plum pudding,” Supplément 4: Ms-12728 to à la fin. Ms-15701. Mélanges XVIIe-XVIIIe. Bibliothéque National de France Arsenal, Paris, France. https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/pageCollections.html?col=2#

I began by cutting a pound of softened butter; the recipe called for suet, lard, tallow, or butter. Butter was the cost-effective choice. I folded the currents and raisins into the butter with my hands so they would fuse. Next, I grated a loaf of white bread into fine pieces and then folded that into the butter. The butter, dried fruits, and bread mixed gave off a strong smell of apple cider vinegar. I added nutmeg, ginger, and a dash of salt.

Image taken by the author.

I separated eight egg yolks from their whites and saved four whites to add to a pint of milk. After adding the liquids, I created powdered sugar in a mortar and pestle and added two spoonsful to the mix with the liqueur; this added richness and sweetness to the batter. The recipe called for the batter to be thick enough for a wooden spoon to stand on its own.

Image taken by the author.

The next step was prepping my cheesecloth for boiling. I soaked the cloth in hot water and added the filling.5 Now, it was time to boil: though it was not large (about the size of a grapefruit), this pudding took five hours. To keep the pudding submerged, I had to keep adding water as it was cooking on the highest heat of my stove. By the end, the water resembled that of a beef tea. Got Bovril? 

Image taken by the author.

Finally, the taste: what does an eighteenth-century plum pudding taste like? Well…it tastes like wet bread and raisins. The smell resembled that of eggy bread, which makes sense considering the main ingredients were a loaf of bread, eight yolks, and milk. It was not bad, but it lacked significant flavor, and my pudding did not conform fully during the boiling process. My expectations were low in terms of taste, but the experience was certainly rewarding. This experiment has helped me find creative methods for conducting my dissertation research when I find myself lacking creativity and struggling to find the words to write about my recipes. This research has helped me with how I think about recipe production. The lack of diagrams or sketches to follow made me focus on the directions. I found myself having to work and think more slowly than I usually do in the kitchen. I relied more on my sense of smell and touch with this recipe. The lack of images with this recipe was freeing for this attempt—I was not worried about looks. I wanted the demonstration to work. I would argue that in modern-day recipes, there are almost too many images; this can inhibit the adaptable nature of cooking and recipe development. The images provided with a recipe signify that the experiment has worked; these ingredients cooked at this temperature will make this product–great—but too many images could lead to feelings of failure if the final product does not match the source. I have learned from this experiment (quite literally) that the proof is in the pudding, to understand the individuals who made these recipes we must be willing to try it their way, but we must also be willing to modify and change the recipes for our liking. I would have added dates, cinnamon, and more sugar to this pudding for a stronger flavor and sweetness.

Boiling the pudding. Image taken by the author.

These sources are evidence that popular recipes passed back and forth between countries earlier than the printed texts show. This French recipe shows how these individuals altered the English plum pudding to their tastes after experimenting with the original source. By continuing to use recipes to unpack the development of cultural cuisines and national dishes, we can understand how people made sense of their class status and cooking knowledge and developed their tastes during the eighteenth century with the influx of new ingredients, foods, and tastes.

The finished pudding. Image taken by the author.

Lauren Owens is a PhD candidate at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. Lauren is working on her dissertation on recipe and remedy production and cultures of health and wellness in eighteenth-century France. Follow @lowenshistory on X for sporadic tweets and the occasional meme.

 

  1. Kaori O’Connor. “The King’s Christmas Pudding: Globalization, Recipes, and the Commodities of Empire,” Journal of Global History 4, no. 1, (2009): 127-55. ↩︎
  2. The French recipes are featured in Antoine Beauvillier’s L’art du cuisiner published in 1814, and Émile Littrés dictionnaire de la langue française (Littré) Tome 3, in 1843, respectively. These texts do not elaborate much on the recipes for plum pudding, in fact, in L’art du cuisiner, the dish is listed under the salad category, as “plombpoutinge, sauce au vin de Malaga.” A.B, Beauvilliers, A. B, Katherine Golden Bitting Collection on Gastronomy, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell Collection. L’art Du Cuisinier. A Paris: Chez Pilet, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1814. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/07023590/ 
    Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la Langue Française (Littré) Tome 3, Hachette, Paris, 1873. Dictionnaire D’autrefois Public Access Collection. https://artflsrv04.uchicago.edu/philologic4.7/publicdicos/navigate/16/18643?byte=25827192. 2024 ↩︎
  3. “Recette pour faire les puddings à l’anglaise: le plum pudding,” Supplément 4: Ms-12728 to à la fin. Ms-15701. Mélanges XVIIe-XVIIIe. Bibliothéque National de France Arsenal, Paris, France. https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/pageCollections.html?col=2#  ↩︎
  4. Hannah Glasse, The art of cookery made plain and easy/ by a Lady (Hannah Glasse). 1747. Book. London: Prospect Books, 1983. The Wellcome Collection. 2024. ↩︎
  5. Glasse, The art of cookery made plain and easy/ by a Lady. ↩︎

Wastefulness and the Negative Perception of English Cookery

By Lauren R. Goldstein

Many people commonly believe that English cookery is “bad,” and that English food became bad after the Second World War. However, when did this negative perception really begin? My dissertation, “Cooking Up A Nation: Perceptions of English Cookery, 1830-1930,” shows that English cookery was perceived poorly beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that criticizing their own cookery was a part of the English defining themselves, rather than something determined by visitors to England post-1945. Many factors contributed to the negative image of English cookery, including food adulteration, food innovations and new technologies, and industrialization and urbanization. This post will focus on the role moral values played in creating a poor perception of English cookery.

Punch image
“Punch’s Stomachology,” Punch, date unknown

Today, we usually judge food by how it tastes, criticizing a dish for its flavour, or lack thereof. However, in the nineteenth century, English cookery was regularly judged by its ability to conform to the emerging Victorian values of cleanliness, economy, and efficiency. As the 1854 cookbook The Art of Good and Cheap Cookery stated, “Good Cookery—is not simply a matter of taste and relish (though that is very important,) but that it is a matter of health and strength, and of real economy” (p. 6).[1] “Good” cookery was the practical application of good character and proper morals and led to the creation of a happy home. Wasteful cookery, as English cookery was perceived to be, was therefore the opposite—it was not clean, it was not thrifty, and it led to unhappy existence.

In the eighteenth century, roast beef became known as England’s “national dish.” The act of roasting was considered specific to the English, and demonstrated the high quality of English beef because only the finest cuts of meat could be properly roasted. At this time, the English perceived their cookery to be honest and considered French cookery to be expensive and pretentious. By the nineteenth century, the national dish of roast beef was considered part of an English national identity, defining the English as “meat eaters.” However, roast beef was no longer celebrated for its plainness. Wastefulness was something food writers frequently noted as one of the core problems with English cookery. Food writers criticized the English for continuing the tradition of eating large joints of meat, such as roast beef, claiming that the national dish conflicted with the need to be frugal and cook efficiently. Large cuts of meat were considered wasteful because they used a lot of fuel and families were accused of buying too much. Serving leftover cold meat all week led to dietary tedium and monotony, another perceived problem with English cookery, and often the leftovers were thrown out, furthering the idea that the English were wasteful. One article from 1873 claimed that the persistence of serving roast beef and mutton was “the fundamental blunder” of English cooking (The Leeds Mercury, 1873).[2]

The critics of English cookery were often contradictory in their comments—serving leftovers was an example of being economical, and yet, the English were accused of becoming bored with them and throwing them out. In the mid-nineteenth century, the English also championed French cookery, especially the national dish of pot-au-feu. In the eighteenth century, food writers had criticized the French, but in the nineteenth century, French cookery was frequently noted as the cuisine from which the English should learn. Catherine M. Buckton, author of the school board cookbook Food and Home Cookery (1879) stated that the French were the “best and most economical cooks in the world,” while the English were “the most wasteful and worst cooks” (p. 31-32). Soup was the highlight of French cookery, and it was repeatedly recommended as the dish to save English cookery—it was considered economical and nutritious. But, an Englishman was not considered to be “a soup-eating animal” (The Pall Mall Gazette, 1881).[3] By the end of the nineteenth century, English cookery’s reputation had been criticized for half a century and its negative perception was set. As an 1893 article in Reynold’s Newspaper declared, “English cookery has become a word of reproach throughout the world, not only on account of its heaviness and want of variety, but in consequence of its great wastefulness.”[4] Taste was not the issue for nineteenth century critics of English cookery—waste was.

[1] Editors of the Family Economist, The Art of Good and Cheap Cookery for the Working Classes, (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1854), 6.

[2] “Literature,” The Leeds Mercury, Thursday, Feb 13, 1873.

[3] “The Cupboard Papers,” The Pall Mall Gazette, Tuesday, July 12, 1881.

[4] “The Democratic World,” Reynold’s Newspaper, Feb 12, 1893.