Last weekend was Stir Up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent, which to atheist folk like me has but one meaning: time to cook Christmas pudding. When else do you get a chance to boil something edible for six hours?

Plum pudding is a dish that over the last 600 years has transformed into a food almost completely unrecognizable from its original recipes. Plum pudding originated from pottage: a slow-cooked meat stew with dried fruit used as a means of preserving meats in late Autumn, a recipe first recorded in the 1400s.

With the boom of cane sugar production in the Caribbean that caused sugar to become affordable to average British folk in the 1700s, the meaty, savoury components of pudding declined and sweet came to the fore. The familiar spiced cannonball of suet and fruit was born. It wasn't until the 1800s that plum pudding became specifically associated with Christmas by poet and seminal cookbook author Eliza Acton. Her book Modern Cookery, in all its branches contains some of the most erudite and clear tips to producing a superior pudding, along with an illustration of a suspiciously spherical dessert that seems designed as a model for a small moon.

The modern Christmas pudding has developed in concert with Britain's imperial expansion: a dish that contains (in both a literal and figurative sense) the fruits of the colonies. In May 1926, Britain formed the Empire Marketing Board, a committee charged with encouraging trade between Great Britain and its erstwhile empire. By Christmas in 1926, it had published its first recipe for "Empire Christmas Pudding"; a recipe that they supposed to have originated from the king's own chef and recommended that housewives do their duty to Britain by sourcing their ingredients accordingly. Their recipe contained (and was to be sourced from):

1 lb. currants (Australia)
1 lb. sultanas (Australia)
1 lb. stoned raisins (South Africa)
6 oz minced apple (Canada)
1 lb. breadcrumbs (United Kingdom)
1 lb. beef suet (New Zealand)
6 oz. cut candied peel (South Africa)
8 oz. flour (United Kingdom)
1 lb. Demarara sugar (West Indies)
4 eggs (Irish Free State)
½ oz. ground cinnamon (Ceylon)
½ oz. ground cloves (Zanzibar)
½ oz. ground nutmeg (Straits Settlements)
1 pinch pudding spice (India)
1 tbsp. brandy (Cyprus)
1 tbsp. rum (Jamaica)
1 pint old beer (England)

The pudding manages to encompass as much of the empire as possible: the patriotic duty was not to just eat locally but help support the rest of the empire. I'm not quite sure of the impact suet exports on New Zealand's GDP, but I could only foresee it being a good thing.

In his survey of the history of the British Empire, Empire, Niall Ferguson points out that:

"The composition of this delectable concoction conveyed an unambiguous message. With the Empire, there would be Christmas Pudding. Without it, there would be only breadcrumbs, flour and old beer. Or as Orwell said, an Empire-less Britain would be just a 'cold and unimportant little island where we should have to work very hard and live mainly on herring and potatoes'."

Food Safari – English airs on Wednesday, 7 January at 7.30pm. Too late for Christmas, but never too late for a pudding.