Dried Vine Fruit, and Why It Went Up in 2024
The three fruits that form the backbone of a Christmas pudding are not interchangeable — and in 2024, every one of them cost more than it had the year before.
What the Three Fruits Are, and What Each One Does
Raisins, sultanas and currants are all dried grapes, but they begin as different varieties, dried by different methods, and they behave differently inside a pudding batter. Getting the proportions right matters more than most recipes acknowledge.
A raisin is a dried muscat or Thompson Seedless grape, sun-dried slowly over several weeks until it is dark, dense and chewy, with a concentrated, wine-adjacent sweetness. In a pudding batter, raisins hold their shape through long steaming and contribute body — you find them in the crumb as distinct, plump pockets rather than dissolving into the background. Their sugar content is high enough to colour the batter directly. Sultanas start as a seedless white grape, traditionally the Sultana or Oval Kishmish variety, and are dried faster — often with a dip in an alkaline solution that breaks down the skin and speeds moisture loss. The result is a paler, softer, more yielding fruit with a lighter, more aromatic sweetness. Sultanas melt almost into the batter during eight hours of steaming, lending sweetness that is diffuse rather than located. Currants are the smallest of the three and the most concentrated. Despite their name, they are not the black or redcurrant of the garden; they are dried Zante grapes, a tiny black variety grown principally in Greece and named after a corruption of Corinth, the region from which the trade was historically routed. Their flavour is sharp, almost tannic, with a tartness that cuts the sweetness of the raisins and the dark muscovado sugar around them. They are the fruit most likely to sink to the basin base if poorly made batter — too loose, too warm — is used, and their small size means they absorb soaking spirit faster than the others.
The ratio in a traditional pudding matters. A mix weighted toward sultanas produces a softer, sweeter result; too many currants and the pudding turns sharp and dense. The standard approach — roughly equal thirds, or a batter that leans slightly toward sultanas — has been a practical and flavour-driven convention rather than a precise formula, codified through iteration rather than decree.
The Case for Soaking Overnight
Soaking dried vine fruit in spirit before mixing is not embellishment. It is the single preparation step most likely to change the texture of the finished pudding. Dried fruit enters a batter with a very low moisture content; without pre-soaking, it draws liquid from the batter itself during steaming, drying the crumb around it and emerging in the finished pudding with a slightly leathery skin. An overnight soak — or ideally a full twenty-four hours — allows the fruit to absorb spirit gradually and fully, plumping it until the surface is tacky and the interior is genuinely hydrated. The spirit itself, usually dark rum, brandy or a combination, does not cook off entirely even across eight hours of steaming; what remains deepens the background flavour in a way that has no replacement.
The quantity required is enough to submerge the fruit fully or to be fully absorbed by it — roughly 150ml of spirit to 570 grams of dried vine fruit, adjusted by how much the fruit soaks up in the first hour. Any remaining liquid goes into the batter, carrying dissolved sugar and flavour compounds from the fruit surface into the mix. Fruit that has been macerated this way also distributes more evenly through the batter because its surface is tacky rather than dry, helping it suspend during mixing and hold position as the batter thickens in the first stages of steaming.
Some recipes call for macerating in fruit juice or cold tea rather than spirit — a legitimate approach when alcohol is excluded, though the preserving effect of the spirit is lost and the pudding's maturation period should be shortened accordingly.
What Happened to the Price in 2024
The 2024 price rise in dried vine fruit was driven primarily by poor harvests in the principal growing regions. Turkey is the world's dominant producer of sultanas, and California is among the world's largest raisin producers; Greece produces nearly all the world's Zante currants, with production concentrated in the Peloponnese and the Ionian Islands. All three regions experienced difficult growing seasons in 2023, the harvests of which fed the 2024 dried fruit supply.
In Turkey, an early-season drought followed by excessive humidity during the drying period reduced both yield and quality in the Aegean growing zones, the source of most European sultana supply. In California, the 2023 raisin grape harvest was reported by the California Department of Food and Agriculture as below the preceding year's level, compounded by ongoing water allocation pressure in the San Joaquin Valley. Greek currant production, already subject to long-term structural decline as growers shift acreage to table varieties, fell further in 2023 due to late spring frosts followed by a dry summer.
The combined effect moved through the supply chain into retail and trade pricing during the first half of 2024. The International Nut and Dried Fruit Council, which publishes quarterly trade data, reported in its 2024 statistical yearbook that global sultana trade volumes tightened materially compared with the prior year, with corresponding upward pressure on prices across European markets. UK grocery buyers, already contending with elevated logistics and energy costs, absorbed a meaningful increase in the cost of dried vine fruit lines across the autumn 2024 season — precisely the window when home bakers stock up ahead of Stir-up Sunday and commercial producers complete their pudding runs.
The practical implication for anyone making a pudding at home is straightforward: the fruit component of a Christmas pudding, already its heaviest single cost, became noticeably more expensive in 2024. Buying currants, sultanas and raisins in bulk from a trade or wholesale supplier rather than in small retail bags reduces unit cost significantly — and a cook planning to make puddings across several weeks, feeding them through November after an October or November mixing day, needs enough fruit to make the arithmetic worth doing. Quality matters too: a plump, well-dried sultana from a named origin will absorb spirit more evenly and hold its texture better through long steaming than a cheaper fruit with higher residual moisture and a more fragile skin. The price rise of 2024 is an argument for buying in bulk, and for buying well, since good fruit is worth the money when it makes up so much of the pudding.