It was once the highlight of Christmas Day – biting into a piece of pudding and finding a coin hiding among the sultanas, signifying a year of good luck was coming right up. It’s a British tradition dating back to at least the early 1300s, when a dried pea was baked into the pudding and whoever found it was crowned king or queen for the night. Over time, the practice evolved, and by the time Aussies were tucking into Christmas pudding, they expected to bite into threepence – or sixpence, if they were especially lucky.
But when 1966 rolled around, : don’t drop the brand-new decimal currency in your batter.
The old money was made from a metal that was safe to cook (well, as safe as cooking any well-handled currency is), but the new copper coins were liable to corrode and the ‘silver’ was actually cupro-nickel, which would turn green and make the pudding taste metallic.
So comprehensive was the research into this vital culinary issue that a three-month scientific study was taken into the effect of pudding on coins, complete with .
But it wasn’t just about green echidnas and frill-necked lizards, according to the CBIC: “A far greater hazard, however, is the larger size of the five cent piece compared to the old threepenny piece. The throats and stomachs of small children may not be large enough to accept the five cent coins.”
Fifty years on, pudding isn’t quite the undisputed hero of the Christmas table anymore, sharing dessert duties with panettones, trifles, pavlovas and sweet stocking stuffers. That might have something to do with our changing cultural composition over the past half-century, or could be due to the spate of choking-hazard-laced, copper-tasting dishes that hit tables in the late ’60s...
Modern alternatives that keep the tradition alive
If you or your ancestors weren’t foresighted enough to keep a stockpile of pre-decimal currency for future Christmases, there are a few things you can do to recreate the excitement of finding a threepence coin in your slice of pudding.
• If you’re a traditionalist, designed for such a use – although they come with the warning that you should add them to warmed-up slices just before serving.
• For something a bit more exotic, there are various places online that sell bespoke Christmas coins with seasonal illustrations, or charms that each have a special meaning – horseshoes and wishbones signify good luck to the finder, while a bachelor finding a button or a spinster finding a thimble means they can expect to remain single for at least another year.
• If you’d been planning to use modern coins before you read this, you can do that; just securely wrap them in tinfoil so they won’t infect the pudding’s flavour with their metallic chemical reaction.
• Finally, you can bake something edible into the pudding, such as a fig, to act as the grand prize. Perhaps a dried pea, if you want to be really traditional...
Whichever option you choose, make sure your guests know there could be a surprise in their slice, otherwise they might find dessert hard to swallow!
