It’s that time of year (Picture: Getty Images)
A homemade Christmas pudding is a real labour of love. And it’s one you should start working on today for best results.
Today (November 26) is Stir Up Sunday, which tradition dictates as the perfect time to concoct the mix for your classic festive dessert.
In the Victorian times, families would gather five weeks before Christmas on the last Sunday before the season of Advent to make the pudding.
Each family member would take turns to stir the pud – believed to be popularise in the UK by Prince Albert – using a wooden spoon to represent baby Jesus’s manger and going from east to west to symbolise the journey of the Three Wise Men.
According to legend, you could make a wish while mixing up the concoction, which contained 13 ingredients as an homage to the son of God and his 12 disciples.
Trinkets like coins could then be added to the mix, which would be steamed and put away ready to be heated come the Christmas Day celebration. It was thought that if the coin ended up in your portion, you’d have good fortune during the year ahead.
The dish contains dried fruit, suet, flour and eggs (Picture: Getty Images)
Yet there was a more practical element to Stir Up Sunday.
Christmas pudding can be a stiff mixture, so it lessens the load if a group of people share the work of combining the dried fruit, suet, breadcrumbs, flour, eggs and spice.
While it’s not totally necessary to make the dish so far in advance, this became the custom around the 1800s as recipes veered towards allowing the pudding’s rich flavours to mature ahead of serving.
Nowadays, however, it’s a much less common practice.
A 2013 survey found that two-thirds of British children had never experienced stirring Christmas pudding mix, as many families now save themselves the trouble and buy a ready-made one instead.
The act of dousing it in brandy and setting it alight still remains, though, and it was recently voted the UK’s favourite Christmas dessert in a nationwide survey.
Despite the Christmas pudding’s icon status, it’s falling out of favour as the years go by, with nearly half (48%) of Gen Z saying they don’t like it.
Claire Hughes, director of product and innovation at Sainsbury’s, claimed that ‘many of those who have written it off completely have never even tried it,’ as the supermarket made efforts to get younger people to give it a go.
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It’s time to get cooking.