the end... by sarah brumble.

i have just received an email from my father as a follow-up to a conversation we had in our christmas day phone call.

One of the things I did was to google “plum pudding” (once upon a time, it may have had plums, but really all that’s called for is fruit…dried in the old days) and a bunch of spices…and the recipe (if there ever was “a” recipe in the first place) seems to have changed repeatedly over the millenium so that today I gather the preferred term is a more generic “Christmas pudding.” The plum pudding that Suzie makes looks absolutely nothing like the pictures offered in Wikipedia.

And I am further corrected. The verse from “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” deals with something called “figgy pudding” (rather than plum pudding). So, of course, good researcher that I am, I looked up figgy pudding. Wikipedia says that it probably ought to be lumped into “Christmas pudding” because, in essence, it’s the same KIND of thing, though it apparently has figs just like plum pudding has plums. But wait a minute! Plum pudding doesn’t (necessarily) have plums, so I guess that must mean that figgy pudding doesn’t have to have figs. Does this culinary mystery, via linguistic albegra, thus mean that figgy pudding and plum pudding can really be, in essence, identical?

These are the sorts of things that keep me awake at night, tossing and turning. I’ll probably die of a severe case of aggravated ulcers.

see where i get it?