American Adaptation and Mrs. Charles Dickens's Plum Pudding

One may argue that the life-span of cultural traditions can be measured in generations, since everyday foods brought here by emigres are often relegated to special occasions when celebrated by their offspring. For Anglo Americans, the recipes that head the list are what we non-Brits think of as Christmas dinner. The menu often concludes with plum pudding, the steamed dessert that resembles a cannon ball with a holly sprig hat and flaming base. The cholesterol-rich preparation serves as an excellent example of a dish that would have otherwise been lost to the shifting fashions of American cookery. This delicious, if hefty, brown mass made from suet, bread crumbs, spices, citrus peel, eggs, sugar, and dried fruit was so well-known that centuries ago, the term plum pudding identified a particular color, shape, or texture for things as diverse as a dog's mottled coat or Melville's description of whale meat ("Plum Pudding," Oxford). Although the term has lost these connotations, it remains so popular that a Google search of "plum pudding" around the holidays yields over 303,000 hits. These can be neatly divided into two categories. First is as a late-nineteenth-century analogy in physics called "Thomson's Model," better known as "The Plum Pudding Model," that described an atom's arrangement of protons and electrons, believed by Professor J. J. Thomson to be as evenly distributed as the raisins in his family's dessert. The second, vastly larger, category is the pudding. Some contemporary Internet sites provide historic notes, and others give recipes far different from Mrs. Charles Dickens's boiled pudding, such as frozen concoctions or those made with soy products. The titles are often descriptive, like Suet, English, Flaming, and Christmas Plum Pudding, the twentieth-century name for the pudding. Others acknowledge a personal connection, and "Mother's Plum Pudding," forsaking Victorian authenticity, is the most often shared recipe. Even Wikipedia, the freely edited online encyclopedia, allows two pages for the dessert. It informs us that "Stir-up Sunday" (about five weeks before Christmas) is the traditional day for the children of the household to give the mixture a stir and make a wish. Before silver in coins was replaced by alloys, a sixpence was thrown into the batter and believed to bring good luck to the person who found it in his or her serving ("Christmas Pudding," Wikipedia). Depending on the culinary fashion in American publications, plum pudding reappears as often as the ghost of Christmas past. A survey of plum pudding recipes in print shows that from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, textbooks for the newly established cooking schools in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other major cities included at least one steamed plum pudding recipe. But trends change, and after World War II, Americans seemed more interested in cookery "as a means of eating quickly and conveniently or as a form of recreation" despite an end to rationing and the economic boom (Clark 126). Laura Shapiro makes the case that the food industry transformed their military surplus and technology into products pitched for family meals. It advertised canned goods, powdered milk and eggs, and frozen produce as well-deserved shortcuts for harried housewives chasing the suburban dream (Shapiro 8-17). With their wartime work gloves removed, women scrubbed their hands of hard factory labor and slipped them into a dressy white pair (or so they were encouraged). For cooks who followed trends, a similar "feminization" for bridge-club fare was featured by women's magazines hyping processed foods. Gelatin, marshmallows, and other dainties lightened ladies' meals and consequently shifted hardy preparations like steamed puddings to annual holiday appearances, if that. Although cookbooks do not necessarily document what was actually prepared by home cooks, they do record contemporary notions. The elite American trendsetters who created Gourmet Magazine in 1941 to raise Yankee standards compiled their first volume in 1950 as The Gourmet Cookbook. …