Stirring Tales!
Plan
Floradora and Cooky like to spend time in the kitchen. Unsurprisingly, Cooky loves to help make cookies, but today is a special day…
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Ingredients
…so she helped select ten and a half cups of dried fruit, grate the cold butter, make fresh breadcrumbs in the blender, measure sugar, crack eggs and find the bottle of mixed spice…
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lovely mixture
…put it all into the biggest bowl in the house…
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Stir it up!
…and stir it up!
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Human help
The youngest human in the family helped a lot too! She helped at every chopping and measuring stage, and cut out circles of parchment and aluminium foil and lengths of string. When it was time, she and all the humans had a turn to stir up the Christmas pudding batter, after which she helped pack the batter into the pudding basins and tie them up! The Human recipe made four medium puddings. They get boiled for six hours now, then kept in a cool place, refreshed with Brandy, and then boiled again for a couple of hours, flamed, and eaten for Christmas Dinner.
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Collect from the Book of Common Prayer
Happy Stir Up Sunday!
(Click here for the Wiki article about Stir-up-Sunday)
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Quimper Hittys 
I hadn’t realised it was stir up Sunday! I had better see if I have everything or it will have to be stir up Monday for me.
It is! We were happy to have our family here to help stir (and chop and measure…) It was a tradition in my husband’s family that I made sure I learned from his mother. It feels a bit odd to realize that I am now that older generation…
It is a lovely tradition! And as another member of the older generation it does feel very odd to find myself here.
Yumbo
I trust it will be! My young human was in charge of the balance of dried fruit so it will be very candied-gingery this year!
I knew it from the title! I hadn’t registered it was Stir-Up Sunday today till I read that, and then I knew what the Hittys were up to 😊 I’m so sad that I married into a family that hates fruit cake, and am so distant from my own family that loves it! Making a tiny one for myself seems a bit tragic, really…
The Hittys love all these foody-y traditions! They also love the flaming pudding…there are mixed feelings about the taste of it, just as there are in the human family!
Thank you Floradora and Cooky. I love this post.
When I was three months old, my hand was put on the wooden spoon handle and my big brother helped me stir the pudding. That was 70 years ago yesterday and I have taken my turn every Stir Up Sunday since.
When I was about 9, my mother forgot until, sitting in church, she heard the beginning of the collect for the day. Probably half the congregation heard her gasp. She rushed out as the service ended, we ran the mile home where she grabbed all the ingredients she could find, not even having bought in dried fruit.
That year, we had an odd Christmas pud made with marmalade, cut up apples, candied peel and glace cherries. Somehow, it worked! I tried to replicate it one year, but without success.
What a wonderful story! Thanks so much for telling us – the apple, marmalade and glace cherry pudding sounds pretty delicious, flavoured with fondness and seasoned with memories!
and a very happy Stir up Sunday to all humans and woodens on Quimper Street. A very tasty pudd filled with love and tradition.
It is exactly that – not just dessert, a treasure chest of love and tradition!
Hey~! Stir up Sunday! An Anglican story I didn’t quite remember .
I married in to the Anglican traditions – and am fond of this one in particular. Funnily enough, when my mother-in-law died and the siblings wanted to re-create her Christmas pudding, they dug through her cookbooks for the Traditional Family Recipe. The pudding they all had been eating for years turned out to from be a recipe I had shared with her 35 years ago!
We are without this tradition and have never heard of stir up Sunday. The bit of liturgy I was brought up with unfortunately did not include this sweet celebratory day. Again, I thank you for this enjoyable moment in time. Becky J
I didn’t know about it either as I was brought up with Swedish and Finnish traditions, but my husband’s family was Church of England so I learned some new delicious and meaningful traditions from them. We love to share!
I had never heard of stir up Sunday……my what a labor of love those Christmas puddngs are!! They do sound rather lovely.
Some are very fond of the Christmas pudding – and it is always exciting to set it aflame!