Figgy pudding


Figgy Pudding is a rather vague term used for a class of traditional seasonal winter dishes usually forming sweet & savory cakes, containing a sour-sweet creamy layer of honey, fruits and nuts, as well as a flavorful savory filling of rich herbally accentuated pork sweetmeats. 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:
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". 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:
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.

Popular culture

Often associated with the original traditions of Christmas, it is most notably referred to in the Christmas carol "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" in the line "Now bring us some figgy pudding!". Figgy pudding is not plum pudding, although it can be considered a precursor to it. It is not as rich, nor as complex in its recipe.
A number of Christmas markets will offer figgy pudding flavored desserts as part of their range, though the relation of these to the original taste-wise is rather doubtful.

Cross-reference