By Fabia Buescher (fb586@cam.ac.uk)
Christmas in the nineteenth-century was, as it is today, a time for celebrating, laughing and eating together. To such conviviality, a lavish Christmas dinner couldn’t go amiss. The Victorian Christmas tables were filled with mince pies, Christmas puddings and roasted meat, including turkey, beef and goose.
Yet not everybody chose to eat meat. Believing that a meat-free diet is ‘favourable to health, peace, and happiness, and has a tendency to abolish everything that makes us miserable in this world’,[i] in 1847, a group of Britons founded the first vegetarian society in the modern western world.[ii] Although vegetarianism in the nineteenth century wasn’t a mainstream movement, it nevertheless attracted the attention of scientific and political discussions, cookery books and the periodical press. London’s vegetarians, for example, used The Times to advertise lectures, soirées, vegetarian books and lodgings and even to circulate a recipe for a vegetarian Christmas pudding.[iii]
Read more: Victorian Vegetarians: Nineteenth-Century Christmas Puddings (veggie edition)In other newspapers, too, vegetarian recipes were widely disseminated. For example, in October 1897 in the Women’s Penny Paper, a contributor describes his experience with making a vegetarian Christmas pudding:
‘Last Christmas I resolved that I would have a pudding of my own make, although I had never made any puddings or pastry. […] There has always been a doubt implied or expressed in vegetarian recipes about Christmas puddings without suet’.[iv]
Notwithstanding the doubts of his wife and friends, he set out to make his meat-free Christmas pudding, using the following ingredients: ‘One pound Hovis flour, half pound currants, quarter pound raisins, quarter pound desiccated cocoanut, half a bottle of Lucca oil, quarter pound of peel.’ As he proudly proclaims, ‘it turned out better than I expected; in fact, I could not have wished for a better in every respect. It looked, smelled, and tasted like any other pudding’.[v]
So, if you are looking to try out a new Christmas pudding recipe, have a look at some of the many Victorian vegetarian cookery books and discover the flavours of the nineteenth-century dinner table!
Illustration: The Vegetarian Society banquet at Freemasons’ Tavern, Illustrated London News, 16 August 1851, p. 224.
[i] The Truth-Tester, 22 October 1847, p. 15, cited in James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), p. 1.
[ii] James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), p. 1.
[iii] Ibid., p. 178.
[iv] Anonymous, ‘A Vegetarian’s Plum Pudding’, Women’s Penny Paper, 21 October 1897, p. 263.
[v] Ibid.
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