Talk:Fruitcake

message: I am concerned that the references to Christmas Pudding and Plum Duff (mentioned under the heading for New Zealand) are misleading.
Christmas Pudding is a direct (1) lineal descendant of medieval puddings of meat and vegetables , boiled  , and with fruit and spices added for flavour. The meat is nowadays represented only by the use of suet , and the vegetables are reduced to at most a token of grated carrot , but leaving aside the question of ingredients, the fact that it is boiled represents a significant difference from fruitcake, which like all cakes is baked by convection in an oven . Christmas Pudding has traditionally been boiled in a cloth or pudding basin--whether in the UK , Australia , or New Zealand --and accordingly is cooked at a temperature never exceeding 100C. A cake, on the other hand, is dry-baked at a temperature far in excess of that: generally in the range 175-190C ; for a heavy cake such as a fruitcake typically in a falling oven, but from around 175-200C only down as far as 150C  or 140C  .
Plum Duff (2) was indeed a colonial dish of New Zealand , and also of Australia , and in both cases was based on the Plum Puddings of England in the 18th and early 19th centuries: here the word 'plum' refers to dried plums (prunes), which by extension had come to refer to any dried fruit  . And not only do they contain similar ingredients, but they are also puddings, and accordingly also cooked by boiling rather than by baking (which is one reason for their living on both on shipboard  and in colonial Australia and New Zealand, as both sailors and drovers, shepherds, shearers and many other early colonists had little access to ovens).
In summary, Plum Duff and Christmas Pudding are not specific to New Zealand, and so should not be specifically mentioned under that heading. They are not two different things, but are aspects of the same thing, namely a boiled descendent of the meat puddings of old--and accordingly more closely related to a haggis than any cake. More seriously, the significant difference in cooking methods suggests that the references to Plum Duff and Christmas Pudding are misleading and should be removed from an article that focuses on a baked cake.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Whilst there was a break in the English tradition of puddings for half a century from the 1660s , this was not universal over all the European continent. The German-born Hanoverian King George 1 supported their re-introduction, and indeed the recipe for Christmas Pudding that was served from his kitchens is reputed to still be in use by the British monarchy to this day . 
2. The term "Duff" is alledgedly due to the peculiarities of English spelling, and a story printed in 1893 explains it thus: if R-O-U-G-H is pronounced "Ruff", then D-O-U-G-H should similarly be pronounced "Duff" .
Tannguera (talk) 15:05, 11 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pudding/Duff - Remove  

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