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I still recall the divine taste of the freshly baked plum cake – an iconic British pudding – which my Anglo-Indian school friends would treat us to around Christmastime in India.
Little did I know back then of its history as a vehicle of empire building. In the 1920s, the pudding – incorporating ingredients from Britain’s colonies, such as dried fruits from Australia and South Africa, cinnamon from Ceylon, spices from India and Jamaican rum – became a way to replicate British culture, writes Troy Bickham, a historian of Great Britain and the empire at Texas A&M University.
Its promotion as the “Empire Pudding” landed it on the dining tables of people across the empire, and indeed many in India still regard it as part of “tradition.” In the U.S., where I now live, Christmas pudding can often, as Bickham jokingly describes, taste like a “boiled mass of suet … as well as flour and dried fruits that is often soaked in alcohol and set alight.”
But what is remarkable, as Bickham writes, is that there are “so many adaptations,” including American ones – with pecans and cranberries as well as bourbon substituted for brandy – serving as a reminder of an Anglo-American concoction.
So, this year, for a whiff of nostalgia, I might settle for a version sold at London’s airports and brought over by friends transiting through – and let it be another reminder of our new global connectedness.
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Kalpana Jain
Senior Religion + Ethics Editor/ Director of the Global Religion Journalism Initiative
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The Christmas pudding, a legacy of the British Empire, is enjoyed around the world – including in former British colonies.
esp_imaging/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Troy Bickham, Texas A&M University
The Christmas pudding, once known as the ‘Empire Pudding,’ reflects the lasting legacy of the British Empire.
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Ethics + Religion
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Education
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Author Comment 💬 |
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“The fact is ALL ancient DNA is too degraded for cloning, which requires the cells to be in very good condition. With mammoths, what some people are discussing is to use information from ancient genomes to edit genes in a closely related modern species (elephants) that are responsible for the major physical traits of mammoths. So they’re not actually talking about “bringing back” an extinct lineage, but more thinking about making an elephant look more like a mammoth. The same could theoretically be possible for dog breeds. But, there are many, many, technical barriers to this being a reality, it may happen one day but we’re nowhere near that.”
– Logan Kistler on the story, Mutton, an Indigenous woolly dog, died in 1859 − new analysis confirms precolonial lineage of this extinct breed, once kept for their wool -
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