![Aeroplane Christmas pudding
Text from Buckinghamshire County Council Museum website:
This month’s object is a 1940s tinned Christmas pudding, made in Australia.
Hot Christmas weather in Australia required major adaptation of Christmas customs in chilly Britain. Cookery columns in Australian magazines featured recipes for hot Christmas puddings alongside ice cream puddings or cold puddings made with gelatin. Australians also invented the Christmas picnic. The 1930s woman’s magazine ‘Home’ recommended tinned Christmas pudding as ‘convenient and ideal too for the picnic hamper’.
This Aeroplane tinned pudding was probably produced to be eaten at a picnic. The label states ‘If required to serve hot place in boiling water for 45 minutes’ and many people may have eaten it cold. It was produced by Gartrell White, bread and cake manufacturers based in Newtown, New South Wales and, in the 1940s, one of the largest individual bakeries in the southern hemisphere.
Christmas celebrations have always been associated with feasting and an abundance of food during the hungry winter months. In the Middle Ages, a Lord of the Manor was expected to provide all his tenants with a meal. In 1398, King Richard II ‘kept his Christmas at Liechfield, where he spent [used] in the Christmas time 200 tunns of wine, and 2000 oxen with their appurtenances’. It was not really until the 19th century that Christmas foods became specialized.
Christmas pudding is one of the most popular and enduring of Victorian Christmas foods. Like the mince pie, it developed from a dish which originally contained meat, although by the 19th century suet was the only remaining meat product in the pudding. Plums or dried fruit were always important ingredients and the pudding was often known as ‘plum pudding’. In 1875 ‘Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery’ plum pudding as ‘a national dish, despised by foreign nations because they never can make it fit to eat. In almost every family there is a recipe for it, which has been handed down from mother to daughter through two or three generations…It is usual, before sending it to table, to make a little hole in the top and fill it with brandy, then light it, and serve it in a blaze. In olden time a sprig of arbutus, with a red berry on it, was stuck in the middle, and a twig of variegated holly, with berries, placed on each side. This was done to keep away witches…If well made, Christmas plum pudding will be good for twelve months.’
Many families made their own pudding, usually on Stir-Up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent and the last chance before Christmas. All the family stirred the pudding and sometimes small charms or coins were thrown in for good luck.
Many British Victorian Christmas traditions were also transported to British colonies. For many Australians, Christmas celebrations and foods were a link with the mother country. William Howitt in 1855 wrote about a group of settlers recreating a British Christmas in the Australian outback where they celebrated ‘with the good old orthodox roast-beef and plum pudding. We…drank a Merry Christmas to all our friends in Old England, in a tumbler of brandy-and-water. We tried to believe it Christmas, spite of the thermometer at 120°, of diggers’ tents in the distance, and the Bush around us’.
Although few countries outside Britain enjoy Christmas pudding as a traditional food, it is still popular in Australia and many recipes for Australian traditional Christmas puddings can be found online.
For more information call 01296 331441 or email library@buckscc.gov.uk](http://28.media.tumblr.com/N4QjglHdAhsmhshz8FOQuFzmo1_500.jpg)
Text from Buckinghamshire County Council Museum website:
This month’s object is a 1940s tinned Christmas pudding, made in Australia.
Hot Christmas weather in Australia required major adaptation of Christmas customs in chilly Britain. Cookery columns in Australian magazines featured recipes for hot Christmas puddings alongside ice cream puddings or cold puddings made with gelatin. Australians also invented the Christmas picnic. The 1930s woman’s magazine ‘Home’ recommended tinned Christmas pudding as ‘convenient and ideal too for the picnic hamper’.
This Aeroplane tinned pudding was probably produced to be eaten at a picnic. The label states ‘If required to serve hot place in boiling water for 45 minutes’ and many people may have eaten it cold. It was produced by Gartrell White, bread and cake manufacturers based in Newtown, New South Wales and, in the 1940s, one of the largest individual bakeries in the southern hemisphere.
Christmas celebrations have always been associated with feasting and an abundance of food during the hungry winter months. In the Middle Ages, a Lord of the Manor was expected to provide all his tenants with a meal. In 1398, King Richard II ‘kept his Christmas at Liechfield, where he spent [used] in the Christmas time 200 tunns of wine, and 2000 oxen with their appurtenances’. It was not really until the 19th century that Christmas foods became specialized.
Christmas pudding is one of the most popular and enduring of Victorian Christmas foods. Like the mince pie, it developed from a dish which originally contained meat, although by the 19th century suet was the only remaining meat product in the pudding. Plums or dried fruit were always important ingredients and the pudding was often known as ‘plum pudding’. In 1875 ‘Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery’ plum pudding as ‘a national dish, despised by foreign nations because they never can make it fit to eat. In almost every family there is a recipe for it, which has been handed down from mother to daughter through two or three generations…It is usual, before sending it to table, to make a little hole in the top and fill it with brandy, then light it, and serve it in a blaze. In olden time a sprig of arbutus, with a red berry on it, was stuck in the middle, and a twig of variegated holly, with berries, placed on each side. This was done to keep away witches…If well made, Christmas plum pudding will be good for twelve months.’
Many families made their own pudding, usually on Stir-Up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent and the last chance before Christmas. All the family stirred the pudding and sometimes small charms or coins were thrown in for good luck.
Many British Victorian Christmas traditions were also transported to British colonies. For many Australians, Christmas celebrations and foods were a link with the mother country. William Howitt in 1855 wrote about a group of settlers recreating a British Christmas in the Australian outback where they celebrated ‘with the good old orthodox roast-beef and plum pudding. We…drank a Merry Christmas to all our friends in Old England, in a tumbler of brandy-and-water. We tried to believe it Christmas, spite of the thermometer at 120°, of diggers’ tents in the distance, and the Bush around us’.
Although few countries outside Britain enjoy Christmas pudding as a traditional food, it is still popular in Australia and many recipes for Australian traditional Christmas puddings can be found online.
For more information call 01296 331441 or email library@buckscc.gov.uk
