Christmas Day and Boxing Day foods in the Skylands

Mince pies used to have meat in them. Recipes called for mutton, beef or tongue along with the fruit and spice, and during the Interregnum the Puritans attacked them as indulgent and suspiciously Catholic. Plum pudding also started as a savory pottage and turned sweet as meat preserving improved in the 18th century. Goose remained England’s main roast until the Victorians, though the farmer Thomas Tusser noted turkey at Christmas by 1573.

Caribbean black cake descends from colonial British plum pudding, remade with rum and brown sugar, and its fruit soaks for months. In 1883 a British planter, Murdoch Brown, handed a cake to Mambally Bapu, a baker in Thalassery, Kerala, and explained how it was done. That is the usual account of India’s first Christmas cake.

Historians disagree on Boxing Day. One theory has Victorian employers giving servants December 26 off and sending them home with leftovers from the feast, while the family ate an informal meal of leftovers. The word eggnog first appeared in print in New Jersey, in the New-Jersey Journal of March 26, 1788, about a young man drinking a glass.