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Travelsleuth Stuart Buchanan MacWatt gets out his mixing bowl to stir up a traditional Dickensian Christmas Plum Pudding and suggests a favourite recipe fir this essential adjunct to festivities!
Charles Dickens, author of the perennially seasonal favourite fable A Christmas Carol, lived for a time in Doughty Street, near London's British Museum in Bloomsbury. He wrote both Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby there in 1839. 'Stir Up' Sunday One of my happy childhood memories is 'helping' Grandmama make the 'Christmas Pud'. She lived Wateringbury, a then rural Kent village still complete with its blacksmithsmith to shoe the plough horses, old watermill and a lane that led mysteriously up to somewhere called 'World's End'. It was wartime. Together with her other grandchildren, I had been 'evacuated' from London to stay with Grandmama; safe from the onslaught of Hitler's Blitz and later V1 'Doodlebugs' and V2 rockets. In those days we children did not consider it a properly constituted Christmas Pudding unless it contained a hidden treasure of silver sixpenny pieces that had been added at the mixing stage. Today they are treasured mementoes but then they were circulating currency and the subject of a popular 1940s song on the radio:
It fell to me as eldest child present to sing this ditty while dropping Grandmama's silver hoard into the mixture as she gave a vigorous stir to the bowl. After this musical rendition each child was called upon to give the bowl a "stir up" with the big wooden spoon while making a solemn promise to be especially good over the succeeding month. The inference was that discovery of a shiny piece of silver in our portion of Grandmama's Plum Pudding on Christmas Day was dependent upon our angelic behaviour between 'Stir Up' Sunday and Christmas Day.
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