Three Victorian Christmas recipes to try at home – including a potato pudding

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was published in 1843 – the same year as the first Christmas card. Over the course of the 19th century, his depictions of the Christmas turkey and charitable spirit were reprinted thousands of times in Britain and America, cementing the fascination with and commodification of Christmas we are familiar with today.

But what about the food eaten at the Victorian dinner table, beyond the (now) traditional turkey? These three recipes, which are both familiar and different to the Christmas menu we now know and love, show how Christmas foods and traditions were being explored and adapted over the course of the 19th century.

Some recipes were more extravagant than our typical modern Christmas dinner, like the “Yorkshire or Christmas Pie” from The Modern Cook by Charles Elme Francatelli (1846), which featured five different birds (pheasant, partridge, woodcock, snipe and grouse), bacon, tongue and French truffles. Here are three slightly less complicated offerings to try at home.

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To start (or to use up leftovers): Turkey soup

From The Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton (1861).

English writer Isabella Beeton’s soup essentially involved simmering the bones and leftover meat of your Christmas turkey into an existing stock to enrich it, before using a thickening agent to make it even richer.

Her reference to “Harvey’s Sauce” demonstrates how common it was to buy branded, mass-produced foodstuffs by this point in the 19th century. A thin, strong-tasting ketchup flavoured with anchovies, garlic and cayenne, the punchy sauce was the brain-child of culinary expert Peter Harvey in the early 1800s.

It became so popular that it was frequently referenced in Victorian literature. It made a lively addition to any soup or gravy.

Beeton, despite authoring one of the most prolific cookbooks of the Victorian era, compiled recipes and information from other sources in her cookbooks, rather than writing them on her own.

Below this soup recipe, she included an excerpt on the history of turkeys, which she notes were “introduced to England, in the reign of Henry VIII” and were “one of the most difficult birds to rear, of any that we have”. Preparing this soup was therefore a history lesson, as well as a way of using up festive leftovers.

Ingredients: two quarts of medium stock, the remains of a cold roast turkey, two oz. of rice-flour or arrowroot, salt and pepper to taste, one tablespoonful of Harvey’s Sauce or mushroom ketchup.

Method: Cut up the turkey in small pieces and put it in the stock. Let it simmer slowly until the bones are quite clean. Take the bones out, and work the soup through a sieve; when cool, skim well. Mix the rice-flour or arrowroot to a batter with a little of the soup; add it with the seasoning and sauce, or ketchup. Give one boil, and serve.

The main course: Roast goose

From Bow Bells: A Magazine of General Literature and Family Reading (1893).

This recipe, taken from a popular, London-based periodical that included items of fashion, literature, current events, recipes and domestic advice, is typical of the 19th-century recipe form.

In contrast to Beeton’s organised recipe, most recipes came in one or more paragraphs. Victorians had to read the entire piece in order to understand what ingredients and equipment they required.

The recipe also relies on the reader knowing that a “quick” fire meant a fiercely burning fire, ascertaining when the bird was cooked and making gravy without instruction. If you were capable of doing so, you could enjoy an alternative to the ever-popular turkey, alongside those in Scotland and the north of England.

In Scotland and the north of England, roast goose is a favourite piece de resistance for Christmas, and, in good sooth, when the bird is young, fat, and well-cooked, there are few viands to beat it. Take sage and wash it, pick it clean, chop it small, with pepper and salt role them with butter and put them into the belly. Never put onion in anything unless you are sure that everybody likes it. Take care that your goose be clean-picked and washed. Either singe or scald the bird. The best way is to scald a goose, and then you are sure it is clean and not so strong. Let your water be scalding hot, dip in your goose for a minute, and all the stumps of feathers will come off clean. When it is quite clean wash it in cold water, and dry it with a cloth; roast it, and baste it with butter, and when it is half-done through some flower [sic] over it, that it may have a fine brown. Three-quarters of an hour will do it with a quick fire, if it is not too large, otherwise it will require an hour. Always have good gravy in one tureen and apple sauce in another.

Pudding: Cottage Christmas pudding

From Modern Cookery, In All Its Branches by Eliza Acton (1845).

English food writer Eliza Acton’s book Modern Cookery was highly popular over the 19th century. She introduced structure to her recipes before Beeton, though many claim the latter was the first to organise recipes in a way that’s more recognisable to modern readers.

What’s most intriguing about this festive recipe, however, is the inclusion of potatoes in the Christmas pudding. The reasons for this are best interpreted through the use of “cottage” in the recipes title, which indicates that this type of pudding might have been made in more rural or working-class areas.

Potatoes are used to bulk up the more expensive flour, as a cheap, relatively flavourless base for the stone fruit and spice that characterise Christmas puddings. Or, like the Scottish goose, it might have been that people who lived in cottages had readier access to potatoes than they would flour, due to the climate where they lived.

The contrast between the inclusion of potatoes and the expensive spices and fruit speaks to the desire, whatever your location or circumstances, to eat special food at Christmas. Food with more flavour, variety and luxurious ingredients than you might eat at other times of the year. Traditional foods were adapted to suit the needs of the cook, but celebration remained at their core.

Flour, 1 ¼lb; suet, 14 ozs; raisins stoned, 20 ozs; currants, 4 ozs; sugar, 5 ozs; potatoes, ¼ lb; ½ nutmeg; ginger, salt, cloves ¼ teaspoonful each; eggs, 4; milk, ½ pint: 4 hours.

A pound and a quarter of flour, 14 ounces of suet, a pound and a quarter of stoned raisins, four ounces of currants, five of sugar, a quarter-pound of potatoes smoothly mashed, half a nutmeg, a quarter-teaspoonful of ginger, the same of salt, and of cloves in powder: mix these ingredients thoroughly, add four well-beaten eggs with a quarter-pint of milk, tie the pudding in a well-floured cloth, and boil it for four hours.

Lindsay Middleton has previously received research funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC UKRI).