We were charmed by this image from the Illustrated London News’ Christmas supplement from 1867, choosing it for our Devon and Exeter Institution Christmas card for this year. This beautiful wood engraving was based on an illustration by German-born artist, Wilhelm Kümpel.

We wondered who this woman was, proudly wielding her plum pudding?

On the following page, the accompanying article ‘Once a year’ gives us the back story. It is a playful piece, in which the writer, ‘J. L.’, imagines a young lady, in charge of Christmas pudding for the first time.

Currants, raisins, eggs, candied citron, lemon and orange peel, and spices go into the pudding. But that is not all.

“A plum-pudding is the triumph of housewifely art. It is to be feared, in these days of showy accomplishments, that many a young lady whose fingers run nimbly over the keys of her piano, and many a fair adept at croquet, well versed, too, in the mysteries of knitting, netting, tatting, and so forth, would be sadly at a loss if set at making a pudding offhand, although the materials were placed at her fingers’ ends”

The writer asks mothers to teach their daughters this important culinary skill, and not to “think of leaving so important a matter as the Christmas pudding in the cook’s hands” (we are reminded here that the ILN’s readers were predominantly from the middle and upper classes).

And why is it so important, at this Christmas dinner, to show off the daughter’s skills?

“For those who in the secret know that the back of her brooch contains the portrait of a certain young gentleman who is at this moment seated, with his mother and sister, at the dining-room table”

This then is her opportunity to show that she is “as much at home in the kitchen as in the drawing or ball room” and does not have “too many airs and graces to make a good stay-at-home wife”.

“a scrutinising glance at the third finger of mamma’s left hand would discover the wedding-ring to be missing – which ring is at this moment in the pudding”

Forget coins, this is a much higher stakes prize! The author describes the old notion that the person who discovered a wedding ring in their portion would be married before next Christmas. The reader would be right to think that this isn’t left entirely to chance.

“Now we leave this happy family to their Christmas pudding – daughter successful, mother and father triumphant, children satisfied, lover delighted, and visitors pleased”

So what’s was in a Christmas pudding in 1867? Dried fruit, certainly, but also a mother and daughter’s reputation, and a chance for a young woman to prove herself worthy of a ring of her own.