Figgy Pudding (occasionally Piggy-Pudding) is a vague term used for a class of traditional Christmas dishes usually forming sweet and savory cakes, containing a sour-sweet creamy layer of honey, fruits and nuts.[citation needed] In later times, rum or other distilled alcohol became often added to enrich the fruitiness of the flavor.
![]() | |
Type | Pudding |
---|---|
Place of origin | United Kingdom |
Medieval cooking commonly employed figs, in both sweet and savoury dishes.[1] 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:[2][1][3]
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.[4] |
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.[5] |
—The Forme of Cury recipe 118 |
The Middle English name had several spellings, including ffygey, fygeye, fygee, figge, and figee.[6][7][8] The latter is a 15th-century conflation with a different dish.[7] 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 figer).[7][6][9] But it too came to mean a "figgy" dish, involving cooked figs, boiled in wine or otherwise.[7] A turn of the 15th century herbal has a recipe for figee:
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.[10] |
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.[11] |
—Laudian Manuscript 553, Bodleian Library |
Liber Cure Cocorum has the recipe under the name "fignade" on page 42.[6][8] Richard Warner's Antiquitates Culinariae has it under the name "fyge to potage".[6][12][8] Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management contains two different recipes for fig pudding that use suet, numbers 1275 and 1276.[13]
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!".[14] 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.[2] 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.