So why do we eat Turkey, Christmas Pudding and Mince Pies without mince??
We eat turkey at Christmas dinner, we may have mince pies and Christmas Pudding … we have candy canes and other sugary sweets – but where do all these traditions come from? The history of such everyday items is fascinating.
It began with Christmas peacocks, swans and geese
The Tudors would probably have eaten venison, peacock (which was skinned and roasted then put back inside the cured skin with the feathers on as a table decoration) and wild boar which was often the centre piece. There is a long tradition of having a Boar’s head for feasts, possibly originating from an Anglo-Saxon tradition of sacrificing the boar for their Yuletide celebrations.
Another common Christmas feast dish was Souse which was pickled pigs feet and ears, and then there was the Tudor Christmas Pie. This consisted of a pigeon inside a partridge inside a chicken inside a goose inside a turkey, which was then put in a pastry case called a coffin and served surrounded by hare and other game birds.
In Tudor times the rich would eat swans and peacocks, and herons and bustards for those less well off. More usual than peacocks at feasts of the nobility were swans. The Percy Family ate them on the principal festivals of the church at the rate of five for Christmas Day, four for Twelfth Night, three for New Year’s Day…The family consumed an enormous range of both moor and waterfowl during the year, but the swans were appointed for those special days. Swan was roasted like goose, those who were not in the swan-eating class had goose or chicken.
It was common too for a cooked peacock to be mounted in its skin on top of a pie. Other birds like partridges, swans, bitterns and herons were frequently placed on top of pies as ornaments and as a means of identifying the contents. This medieval practice of creating a ‘subteltie’ or eye-catching centrepiece remained current until the eighteenth century and even later.
So when did people start to eat turkey?
Turkeys originated from Mexico not Turkey. Turkeys have been around for 10 million years – there are fossils to prove it. The American Indians hunted wild turkey for its sweet, juicy meat as early as 1000AD. Spanish ships first brought it back from the Aztecs of Mexico to Spain: Turkeys are believed to have first been brought to Britain in 1526 by Yorkshire man William Strickland – he acquired six birds from American Indian traders on his travels and sold them for tuppence each in Bristol. His family coat of arms — showing a turkey as the family crest — is among the earliest known European depictions of a turkey. Henry VIII was the first English king to enjoy turkey.
Turkeys came to prosper in East Anglia where the great turkey farms were started. By 1720 circa 250,000 turkeys were walked from Norfolk to the London markets in small flocks of 300-1000. They started in August and fed on stubble fields and feeding stations along the A12 road. Their feet were dipped in tar to protect them. Some were given little leather boots to walk to London before they were slaughtered!
Female turkeys are called hens, male turkeys are stags and baby turkeys are called poults until they are five weeks old. A large group of turkeys is called a flock. Stags gobble while hens make a clicking sound. Domesticated turkeys cannot fly. Wild turkeys can fly short distances up to 55 miles per hour and can run 20 miles per hour. There are 43 different breeds of turkey. The most common in the UK are standard white, bronze and Norfolk black breeds. The white turkey is the second fastest growing animal in the world. Approximately 10 million are eaten in the UK every Christmas. In the US approx. 60 million are eaten at Thanksgiving.
What about Candy Canes?
Hundreds of years ago sugar was very expensive. It was a food of the wealthy. For other people, it was a special treat saved for holidays (Christmas, Easter) and other special occasions (weddings, christenings). Food historians tell us that hard candies (sticks, lozenges, etc.) were originally manufactured for medicinal purposes. This idea survives today in the form of cough drops. Confectioners were quick to recognise the popularity of hard candy, in its various forms. Before long, hard candies of all sorts of shapes, sizes, and flavours were produced.
The concept of sugar as medicine probably came from the tradition of Moslem physicians. They came from a culture which knew and used sugar…That sugar was an expensive and exotic luxury, used medicinally by the subtle and learned Arabs, probably helped reinforce medieval European ideas of its intrinsic goodness. There were plenty of ailments in northern Europe for which sugar was considered a suitable treatment–coughs, colds, chest infections, agues. As Christians saw sugar as medicinal it could be legitimately nibbled during Lent.
It is no coincidence that our earliest information about pulled-sugar sweets comes from compilations of medicinal formulae, not elegant books on fine confectionery. Sugar gradually became more widely available in Europe during the Middle Ages. In Britain it was considered to be an excellent remedy for winter colds. It might be eaten in the form of candy crystals…or it might be made into little twisted sticks –and flavoured with essences supposed to be effective against colds, such as oil of wintergreen.
Christmas pudding
Christmas pudding is the rich culmination of a long process of development of ‘plum puddings’ which can be traced back to the early 15th century. Like early mince pies, they contained meat, of which a token remains in the use of suet. The original form, plum pottage, was made from chopped beef or mutton, onions and perhaps other root vegetables, and dried fruit. As was usual with such dishes, it was served at the beginning of the meal.
The plum pudding’s association with Christmas takes us back to medieval England and the Roman Catholic Church’s 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.
When new kinds of dried fruit became available in Britain, first raisins, and then prunes in the 16th century, they were added. The name ‘plum’ refers to a prune; but it soon came to mean any dried fruit. In the 16th century gradually the meat came to be omitted, to be replaced by suet. By the 1670s, it was associated with Christmas and called ‘Christmas pottage’.
What currently counts as the traditional Christmas pudding recipe has been more or less established since the 19th century….the name Christmas pudding appears to be a comparatively recent coinage, first recorded in Anthony Trollope’s Doctore Thorne (1858). It was a tradition that all the family had to stir the pudding.
Mince pie
“Mince” comes from the word “mincemeat,” which interestingly enough no longer contains meat. Mince pies evolved from a medieval pastry called “chewette.” It was made with chopped meat or liver, boiled eggs, ginger, dried fruit and other sweet ingredients. It was fried or baked. During the 17th century, the meat products were reduced and more fat was added in the form of suet, from either beef or mutton fat. At some point during the 19th century throughout Great Britain and North America, mince pies developed to the point that they no longer contained any meat.
The Tudors enjoyed mince pies, but they had far more significance than today in that they had 13 ingredients to represent Jesus and the apostles, they contained fruit (raisins, currants, prunes) and spices (cloves, mace, black pepper, saffron) and also mutton to represent the shepherds. The shape of these pies was often rectangular; they were referred to as ‘coffins’ which meant box until the 1500s. Others were made with in unusual shapes and called lumber pies. It is said there was a fashion for them to be shaped like a crib, but this practice was supposedly banned by Oliver Cromwell. They were stigmatised by Puritans and a satire from 1656 called Christmas Day poked fun at such priggish zealotry as Idolatrie in crust!
After the Restoration, mince pies were usually circular. Some monsters weighed 20lb, though the ones eaten by Pepys were roughly the same size as today. They involved considerable work; on 25th December 1666, the diarist wrote: ‘Lay pretty long in bed, and then rose, leaving my wife desirous of sleep, having sat up till four this morning seeing her mayds make mince pies.’
The first record of sprouts being eaten at Christmas is in 1587 but the Tudors often had salads in the shape of the family coat of arms!
Large wooden bowls holding up to a galleon of punch would be used containing hot ale or cider, sugar, spices and apples, with a crust of bread at the bottom. One of these brews was known as Lambswool which was made from roasted apples, beer, nutmeg, ginger and sugar the name came from the froth on the top. It was offered to the most important person in the household first, who would drink from the bowl and pass it on. This would not seem odd to the Tudors as drinking from a communal bowl was normal practice.
