A long tradition lies behind many of the foods we are used to eating during the holiday season. Let’s look at just a few of them.

Christmas Pudding
According to the Oxford Companion to Food, by Alan Davidson, Christmas or plum pudding can be traced back to the early 15th century. The first types were not specifically associated with Christmas. Like early mince pies, they contained meat, of which a token remains in the use of suet.

Plum pottage was made from chopped beef or mutton, onions and perhaps other root vegetables, and dried fruit. It was a fairly liquid preparation until the invention of the pudding cloth. It was served at the beginning of the meal. When new kinds of dried fruit like raisins and prunes became available in 16th century Britain, they were added. The name 'plum' refers to a prune; but it soon came to mean any dried fruit. Gradually the meat was replaced by suet. The root vegetables disappeared, although even now Christmas pudding may still includes a token carrot.

By the 1670s, it was particularly associated with Christmas and called 'Christmas pottage'. The old plum pottage continued to be made into the 18th century, and both versions were still served as a filling first course rather than as a dessert. The current traditional Christmas pudding recipe has been more or less established since the 19th century.

Andrea Broomfield says that the plum pudding's association with Christmas goes back to medieval England and the Roman Catholic Church decree that the 'pudding should be made on the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, that it be prepared with thirteen ingredients to represent Christ and the twelve apostles, and that that every family member stir it in turn from east to west to honour the Magi and their supposed journey in that direction.'... Banned by the Puritans in the 1660s for its rich ingredients, the pudding and its customs came back into popularity during the reign of George I.

Known sometimes as the Pudding King, George I requested that plum pudding be served as part of his royal feast when he celebrated his first Christmas in England after arriving from Hanover to take the throne in 1714. By 1740, a recipe for 'plum porridge' appeared in Christmas Entertainments.

Mincemeat and mince pies

According to the food historians, mincemeat pie dates back to Medieval times. At that time, this recipe did, indeed, include meat. It also often contained dried fruits, sugar, and spices, as was the tradition of the day. The distinction between mincemeat and mince was drawn in the mid-nineteenth century when meat began disappearing from the recipe, leaving the fruit, nut, sugar, spice, and suet product we know today. Late 19th century cookbooks contain several recipes for both mincemeat and mince, some containing meat, others not.

In the Middle Ages and into Renaissance times and beyond it was commonplace to spice up or eke out meat with dried fruit, and it seems likely that the earliest mince pies contained a generous measure of such raisins, currants, etc. The reduction in meat content was slow but steady.Mince pie in Britain, is a miniature round pie, filled with mincemeat: typically a mixture of dried fruits, chopped nuts and apples, suet, spices, and lemon juice, vinegar, or brandy. Although the filling is called mincemeat, it rarely contains meat nowadays.

The earliest type was a small medieval pastry called a chewette, which contained chopped meat of liver, or fish on fast days, mixed with chopped hard-boiled egg and ginger. This might be baked or fried. It became usual to enrich the filling with dried fruit and other sweet ingredients. Already by the 16th century minced or shred pies, as they were then known, had become a Christmas specialty, which they still are.

Bethlehem Christmas Menu
There are many excellent sources for learning about Bible-era foods (including modernized recipes & suggested menus). Here are two:
Bethlehem Shepherds dinner
Eggs in Sour Cream
Shepherd's Pie (with old world vegetables...no potato!)
Fresh Green Salad
Gingered Prunes
Pine Nut Wafers
Wise Men of the East menu
Spiced Cider
Chaldean Prunes
Lemon Chicken
Chick-Pea Salad
Persian Cream Ring
Ginger Cakes

MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN CHRISTMAS
Arthurian Christmas feasts swell the pages of medieval literature. One medieval romance begins in the midst of Christmas revelry at Camelot, where King Arthur, his Knights of the Round Table and their ladies are celebrating for 15 days, "with all the food and mirth that men knew how to devise." Merriment notwithstanding, the medieval feast was often an occasion for great pomp and ceremony. At 10 A.M. on Christmas Day, to the sound of clarion trumpets, the marshal would usher guests into the castle's great hall, seating them at long tables according to the established order of precedence.

A bowl of spiced, scented water was circulated for the hand-washing ceremony, and a Latin grace chanted in unison. Then the trumpets blared again, this time to announce the arrival of servers as they entered the hall balancing steaming platters of spit-roasted haunches, gilded fowl and enormous crusty pies. Medieval feasts were traditionally served in three courses. Each course included a soup, followed by a wide range of baked, roasted and boiled dishes, and finally an elaborate sotelty, a lifelike (often edible) scene sculpted in coloured marzipan or dough.

One 15th-century English menu suggests bringing each of the three courses to a close with a sotelty depicting a successive phase of the Christmas story...The bounty of medieval feasts is legendary. One early historian noted that 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."

---Christmas Feasts from History, Lorna J. Sass [Irena Chalmers Cookbooks:New York] 1981 (p. 23-4)




Sicilian Christmas

An old custom in Sicily was to eat 12 kinds of fish/seafood for Christmas Eve dinner. There was one seafood for each of Christ's Apostles as they were considered 'Fishers of Men.'

There is also a tradition known as Vigilia di Magro, of eating seven type of fish, 7 being the number associated with God or the seven sacraments. (6 was connected with the devil.)
Eggnog

Eggnog is a sweetened dairy-based beverage made with milk, cream, sugar, beaten eggs (which gives it a frothy texture), and flavoured with ground cinnamon and nutmeg; alcoholic versions also exist with the addition of various liquors, such as rum, brandy, whiskey, and sake. “Egg nog(g)” is cited in print in American sources from at least the 1770s. The drink is usually served in the wintertime and has been associated with Christmas almost from the first recorded citations.

The “egg” part of the name is obvious, but the “nog” has been the subject of some speculation. Some say the drink was originally called “egg and grog,” but there are no historical citations to support this. Another theory is that “nog” is from the word “noggin,” a small drinking vessel, although no “egg noggin” citation has been found in the 1700s or early 1880s.

“Nog” is cited from at least 1693 and possibly comes from “nug” (as in “nugged ale” or “strong ale"). “Nog” or “nug,” meaning a strong drink, is a more likely etymology than “noggin,” meaning a small drink.

So-enjoy the holidays, and perhaps give a thought to the long traditions behind our Christmas food.