CJ Replay: Madrigal Music Munching

(An excerpt from the Choral Journal  article In the Bleak Mid-Winter: A Candlelit Feast by Will Kesling)

 

       The food was then brought to the tables in numerous dishes by a procession of servitors, every dish containing enough for two people. The gentlemen placed the food in trenches – scooped-out half loaves of bread that were afterwards distributed to the poor. The Lorde of the Manor had a particularly generous helping of food, so that he could offer tasty morsels to a favored guest.

       There would commonly be as many as six meat courses, with as many as four or five different dishesin each course, followed by the much-anticipated Flammen Plum Pudding.

       The plum pudding has evolved from a sorry mess of watery gruel pottage – fermenty – which, according to the oldest recipe extant,’was “wheat boiled till the grains burst, and, when cool, strained and boiled again with broth or milk and yolks of eggs.” It must have been quite awful, for every Christmas somebody tried to do something about it.  Later, lumps of good English suet were added, and by 1670 the old pottage, after centuries of culinary evolution, had sweetened and stiffened into plum pudding much as we now eat it. It was good luck to eat plum pudding on each of the days between Christmas and Epiphany. A wish was to be made each day upon eating the first mouthful.