The Christmas pudding comes with its own liturgical date, its own superstition and a coin hidden inside it — three clues that this dessert is much older and much stranger than it looks under the brandy butter.
Stir-up Sunday
Traditionally the pudding is made five weeks early, on the last Sunday before Advent. The name has nothing to do with cooking: the Collect for that day in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer opens “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord…”, and congregations took the phrase home as a reminder to get the pudding started. Each family member stirs the mixture and makes a wish — and the pudding then sits and matures until the day, which is also why it survives being made a month in advance.
The coin in the pudding
The hidden sixpence — wealth and luck to whoever finds it — is the last survivor of a much older game. Records going back to the 1300s describe a dried bean or pea baked into the Twelfth Night cake, with the finder crowned king or queen of the festivities for the night. The token migrated from cake to pudding and hardened into currency: a silver farthing or penny at first, a threepenny bit after the First World War, and from 1937 the sixpence that gave the tradition its name.
Source: The Royal Mint
A fire hazard, served flaming
It is also the only course of the year deliberately set on fire at the table, which makes it the culinary cousin of the light-up jumper: theatrical, slightly hazardous, and entirely the point. The pudding’s savoury ancestor — the mince pie, back when it contained actual meat — has its own history here, and the Twelfth Night cake it borrowed the coin from has a story of its own.
Knitwear for the flaming course
Both real knit — see why that matters if you are choosing one for the whole season.