Figgy pudding facts for kids
Figgy Pudding (occasionally Piggy-Pudding) is a vague term used for a class of traditional Christmas dishes usually forming sweet & savory cakes, containing a sour-sweet creamy layer of honey, fruits and nuts. In later times, rum or other distilled alcohol became often added to enrich the fruitfullness of the flavor.
Etymology
Medieval cooking commonly employed figs, in both sweet and savoury dishes. One such dish is fygey, in the 14th century cookbook The Forme of Cury, which in Modern English is "figgy", this dish being known as figgy pudding or fig pudding:
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Take Almaende blanched; grynde hem and drawe hem up with watr and wyne; quartr figs hole raisons. Cast þerto powdor gingr and hony clarified; seeþ it wel and salt it, and seve forth. |
Take blanched almonds, grind them, mix with water and wine, quartered figs, whole raisins. Add in powdered ginger, clarified honey, boil it well and salt it, and serve. |
| —The Forme of Cury recipe 118 |
The Middle English name had several spellings, including ffygey, fygeye, fygee, figge, and figee. The latter is a 15th century conflation with a different dish. Figee was in fact a dish of fish and curds, which was named figé in Old French, meaning "curdled" (the past participle of the Old French Lua error in Module:Language at line 197: Name for the language code "fro" could not be retrieved with mw.language.fetchLanguageName, so it should be added to Module:Language/data.). But it too came to mean a "figgy" dish, involving cooked figs, boiled in wine or otherwise. A turn of the 15th century herbal has a recipe for figee:
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Nym figes, & boille hem in wyn, & bray hem in a morter with lied bred; tempre hit vp with goud wyn / boille it / do therto good spicere, & hole resons / dresse hit / florisshe it a-boue with pomme-garnetes. |
Take figs and boil them in wine, and pound them in a mortar with bread. Mix it up with good wine; boil it. Add good spices and whole raisins. Dress it; decorate it with pomegranate seeds on top. |
| —Laudian Manuscript 553, Bodleian Library |
Liber Cure Cocorum has the recipe under the name "fignade" on page 42. Richard Warner's Antiquitates Culinariae has it under the name "fyge to potage". Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management contains two different recipes for fig pudding that use suet, numbers 1275 and 1276.
