Victorian Homes

Victorian Christmas recipes to follow this year

Victorian Christmas

If you’re thinking about having an authentic Victorian Christmas, there’s no time like the present to start planning one. The Christmas cake alone usually takes a few months to mature; doing things the old-fashioned way may not be the fastest, but it’ll certainly be tasty.

ingredients

Try out Mrs Beeton’s Victorian Christmas cake recipe

The first job to tackle is the showpiece Christmas cake. It’s best to get baking on this richest of fruit cakes around two or even three months before Christmas. This gives you plenty of time to let it mature.

One of the most famous cooks of the period was Isabella Beeton, the London based journalist, editor and writer whose first book, the 1861 work Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, is still used as a popular point of reference today. Here is Mrs Beeton’s Christmas cake recipe and others that she wrote to help people celebrate their Victorian Christmas.

You will need  to “feed” the cake regularly – every couple of weeks or so – with your spirit of choice. This is usually rum, brandy or sherry. You can prick the surface of the cake with a fork and paint on the alcohol generously with a pastry brush.

As well as enriching the flavour, the alcohol will give the cake a better texture, colour and aroma. Between feeding, you will need to wrap the cake tightly in greaseproof paper and then foil and store in a cake tin left in a cool, dry place.

Set some time aside about a week before the big day to ice and decorate the cake with your favourite festive things. Here are some decoration ideas, but note that the Victorian Christmas cake was traditionally adorned with a simple red tartan ribbon and a sprig of holly. If you want to go the truly authentic route, this is the way forward.

Victorian Christmas

Follow a Victorian sloe gin recipe

The Victorians would often forage berries from hedgerows and use them to flavour spirits, turning them into luscious liqueurs. Sloe gin and blackberry vodka are among the favourites and this is another job you can start now.

The sloe is a relative of the edible plum but is smaller, harder and more tart. It comes from the blackthorn bush found throughout the UK.

Gin was hugely popular during the Victorian era. In the late 1820s, the first ‘Gin Palaces’ were built in London, notably Thompson and Fearon’s in Holborn and Weller’s in Old Street. These were based on the new fashionable shops being built at the time, fitted out at great expense and lit by new gas lights.

“Shut up and drink your gin”

Gin Palaces were thought to be vulgar by the upper classes but they were hugely popular with the working classes.  Charles Dickens described them as “perfectly dazzling when contrasted with the darkness and dirt we have just left…” in his Sketches by Boz.

And in Oliver Twist, Dickens’ Fagin famously tells his gang of child pickpockets to “shut up and drink your gin” – even though most of them are young teenagers.

Gin is bang on trend today, just as it was during Queen Victoria’s reign, so make a batch of sloe gin now and it’ll be ready for drinking during your Victorian Christmas. If you can resist the temptation, it will be even better the following year.

All you need to make sloe gin is one litre of gin – there’s no need to splash out on an expensive brand – as well as sloes, golden caster sugar and a wide sealable jar big enough to hold all the ingredients.

Here’s a recipe for sloe gin and some advice on how to find the best sloes to use.

Victorian Christmas

In a very similar way, you can give a new twist to vodka, but this time using frozen blackberries, either foraged and frozen earlier in the year or bought from the supermarket.

Blackberry vodka is made in exactly the same way as sloe gin but you swap the spirits and the fruits. Again, it could be drunk during this year’s Victorian Christmas, but if you have the patience and can defy the temptation, even better.

Sloe gin and blackberry vodka can be drunk with your favourite mixer, as a shot or in a cocktail.

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Make rumtopf with berries, cherries, plums and apricots

Another seasonal treat for a Victorian Christmas is the rumtopf or rum pot introduced from Germany.

The rumtopf is basically a dessert or compote of mixed fruit and rum traditionally eaten around Christmas.

A mixture of various fruits, including berries, cherries, plums and apricots, high-strength rum and sugar is filled into a large stoneware pot. The mixture is then matured for several months until the fruit is soft and completely saturated with rum.

Traditionally, the rumtopf is set in a cool and dark place in spring, and different kinds of ripe fruit are added to it over the months as they come into season.

In today’s supermarkets, all fruits are available almost all the time, so it no longer has to be a 12-month job. Either way, the end product is fully preserved to be eaten in winter, after the Rumtopf has matured, as part of your authentic Victorian Christmas.

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