Festive feasts: A sweet history of Christmas pudding, Lebkuchen and panettone — SECONDS

Across the world, Christmas is celebrated with a variety of special desserts. There are the mince pies of England, the yule logs of France and the stollens of Germany. There’s Georgian gozinaki, a confection made of caramlised nuts fried in honey and Finnish joulutorttu, a pastry filled with prune jam. In Brazil they eat rabanadas, a kind of Portuguese French toast, in the Philippines they bake bibingka, a type of rice cake, while in Nigeria they snack on chin chin, little pieces of fried dough that are hard and crunchy. Christians have a sweet tooth and Christmas gives them the perfect reason to indulge.

Here we explore three famous festive desserts from Europe, the English Christmas pudding, the German Lebkuchen and the Italian panettone.

Christmas puddings: Pudding the past behind you

Christmas puddings - or plum puddings, as they’re also known - can be traced back to medieval England. But they weren’t actually puddings, at least not in the way we think of them now. And they weren’t associated with Christmas.

The famous Xmas pud began life as pottage, a kind of thick stew, which included raisins, dried fruit, spices and wine, as well as meat or a meaty stock (just like early mince pies).

It wasn’t until the end of the 17th century that pottage became more solid, being cooked inside a skin, like a sausage. It also became more associated with the festive season, being called ‘Christmas pottage’, though it remained a dish for dinner rather than dessert.

During the 1640s, when England was in the midst of a civil war, the Puritans tried to abolish Christmas festivities and it’s been claimed that eating mince pies and Christmas pudding was made (and still is) illegal. While they were seen as symbols of excess, the individual dishes were never explicitly banned.

Another popular myth says that King George I (or the ‘Pudding King’), served Christmas pudding as part of his first Christmas feast in England in 1714 - though this is probably also untrue.

By the time the Victorian era came around, the dish was a celebrated Christmas staple. The fifth Sunday before Christmas was known as ‘Stir-up Sunday’, in which families would each take time to stir the pudding mixture from east to west in honour of the Three Wise Men’s journey to see the baby Jesus.

During the preparation, the mother would discreetly drop trinkets into the pudding to tell the family’s fortune - a ring represented marriage and a coin brought wealth, while a miniature horseshoe foretold luck and a thimble spinsterhood.

Lebkuchen

If you’ve visited a German Christmas market before, you’ve probably already come across Lebkuchen, Germany’s traditional yuletide biscuits. You’ll find them hanging from ribbons, often in the shape of hearts and adorned with loving messages written in icing.

These sweet treats might be relatively recent additions to the British Christmas but they have a history that stretches back nearly eight centuries in Germany.

Lebkuchen was one of the earliest types of gingerbread in Germany, created by Franconian monks in the 13th century. Early recipes often contained rye flour, honey and various spices. According to some, the Germanic gingerbread originally contained seven spices - such as ginger, pepper, cinnamon and nutmeg - which represented the seven days it took God to create the world.

During the 16th century, production of Lebkuchen developed rapidly around the city of Nuremberg, which was conveniently located at the crossroads of two important trade routes, as well as being a centre of the spice trade. The city was also surrounded by forests abundant with honeybees, a key source of sweetness in a time when sugar was expensive.

The gingerbreads that came out of Nuremberg were of such high quality that they were sometimes used to pay city taxes, while gilded versions were given as gifts to the noble classes and royalty. It became such an important industry in Nuremberg that the gingerbread bakers, called Lebküchnermeister, formed their own guild in 1643 and began adding more luxurious ingredients to their mixtures, including nuts and eggs.

During the 19th century in Germany and Austria, heart-shaped Lebkuchen became popular. They were often decorated with romantic messages and exchanged between lovers or given as favours to wedding guests. It’s these that can still be found at German Christmas markets across Europe.

Panettone: Dough-dough-dough

Some believe the panettone dates back to ancient Rome, with a recipe for a cake made with leavened dough and honey appearing in Apicius’ De re coquinaria, a cookbook from the first century CE. Evidence suggests this kind of cake was eaten throughout the ancient world, particularly at Christian celebrations.

Nobody is sure when panettone first became associated with Christmas. The earliest evidence comes from the work of a Milanese humanist named Giorgio Valagussa, writing in the 1470s. Valagussa records the Duke of Milan’s family gathering on Christmas Eve for a ritual known as the ‘Ceremony of the Log’, where the Duke would serve a sweet, bread-like cake. But it’s unlikely this version resembled today’s panettone, as it was much denser and made without the tasty extras we’re familiar with.

There are two tales associated with the birth of the modern panettone.

The first takes place on Christmas Eve, when the Duke of Milan held a great banquet. Disaster struck when the chef burned the magnificent dessert he’d been preparing. Luckily for him, a kitchen boy - called Toni - gave him a family recipe for a cake made with leftovers. The party guests loved the improvised dessert so much it quickly became a popular tradition. In honour of the kitchen boy, this new, must-have dessert is christened pane di Toni.

The second story goes something like this. A nobleman, called Ughetto, falls in love with a baker’s daughter, named Adalgisa. Unable to marry due to their differing social statuses, Ughetto disguises himself as a peasant and gets a job working in the bakery. A rival bakery threatens to drive Adalgisa’s father’s bakery out of business. But Ughetto has a eureka moment when he adds more butter and sugar to the panettone recipe, and then more eggs and lemon zest. Customers love it, demand grows and it becomes the hot new festive food. It also makes the baker a very rich man, meaning Ughetto and Adalgisa are able to marry. And they all live happily ever after.

In reality, it wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century that a Milanese baker named Angelo Motta added more yeast to the panettone mixture, transforming the cake from a flat loaf to the fluffy dome we know today. This led to panettone being baked on an industrial scale, helping to solidify the cake as stalwart of the Italian Christmas table.