It was a pottage before it was a pudding, and 1861 is where it stopped moving
Where these recipes came from — the medieval pottage, Mrs Beeton, the pudding cloth, wartime rationing.
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From Frumenty to the Cloth-Boiled Pudding: the Medieval Transition
A spiced grain pottage and a boiled cloth parcel look nothing alike. The line between them is nonetheless direct.
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Mrs Beeton's Christmas Pudding, and What She Changed
The 1861 recipe did not invent the Christmas pudding. It standardised it — and that is the harder thing to do.
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The Cloth Came First: How the Basin Replaced It
The pudding cloth shaped British cooking for more than a century before the ceramic basin made it obsolete — almost.
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What Rationing Did to the Christmas Pudding
Wartime Britain couldn't spare the dried fruit. What replaced it reshaped the pudding for a decade.