Well, Christmas is on its way now and like many other wives
and mothers I am getting into the festive mood and preparing to welcome
visitors here over the holiday.
I have
also been looking at how Christmas was celebrated in the eighteenth century –
not amongst the rich or the aristocracy but the "middling sort", people more like my own family. This would include people such as Anne
Hughes, a farmer's wife who kept a diary at the end of the 18th
century.
In her diary entry for 23rd December 1796 she says she and
her maid were busy preparing food for Christmas, including "boiled hams,
great big mince pies, roast gees and hens and boiled and roasted beef"
while her mothe- in-law made "a pudden for carter and shepherd". She
also describes a meat cake that that was very well received – it seems to have been
a cake tin lined with pastry, a layer of "chopped beef, onions and
herbs", then a layer of pastry and more layers of meat mixture and pastry
until the tin was filled. This was "cooked until done" (not very helpful). It was served cold in slices, like a cake,
and her neighbours were most impressed! On
Christmas day she also served "2 hares, spice pudding, apple pies,
junkets, cider cake, cinnamon cake and a rich Christmas cake." Her husband
was at one end of the table, carving the beef and geese and Farmer Ellis at the
other, cutting the hams etc.
In the evening two fiddlers played while they danced a merry
jig, "Mistress Prue" played a merry tune upon the spinet and after
that they told stories, played "Popp" and snap dragon, bobbed for
apples, ate cakes and wine then "danced till supper".
It sounds like a really lovely Christmas day – compare this
to the diary entry some forty years earlier from Thomas Turner, a Sussex Shopkeeper. Thomas
tells us that on Christmas day he and his servants attended church, then they
had a few visitors to dine on "a buttock of beef and plumb suet
pudding". So far, so good, but Thomas tells us that in the evening he read
"two nights of the Compaint" – a book of religious night thoughts –
"...one of which was "The Christian's Triumph against the Fear of
Death".
Two very different views of Christmas, one much more
reflective than the other, but both quite recognisable today. How will you be spending your day? Do tell!
Sarah Mallory
Beneath the Major's Scars - pub Dec 2012 Harlequin & Boon
The Illegitimate Montague - pub Dec 2012 Harlequin Mills & Boon
4 comments:
I love the vagueness of the pie recipe. It reminds me of the one I heard once for goose. "Take one brick and place in the oven with the goose. when the brick is ready to eat, so will the goose be..."
(someone not very keen on goose, methinks!)
I love that, Annie, thanks for sharing! I shall stick with traditional turkey this Christmas! Thanks for dropping by
Thank you, Sarah, for this fascinating insight into bygone Christmases.
The farmer's wife's 'meat cake' sounds interesting. I can think of lots of ways to adapt that for today's tastes ... and what a good standby, served with a tasty home-made pickle for when unexpected callers arrive.
I could appreciate the roast gees too, not sure though about the pudden for carter and shepherds.
Rena x
Thanks Rena - I may have a go at the meat cake one day... if so I will blog about the result! You are right, the pudden sounds a bit stodgy for our tastes, but if you had been out in the cold all day perhaps it was just what you wanted!
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