There are few foods as synonymous with the festive season as the humble Christmas pudding. Carolers demand it in We Wish You A Merry Christmas, Charles Dickens made it a centrepiece of the Cratchits’ feast in A Christmas Carol and every year in the UK we eat a massive 25 million of the sweet treats. Plenty are created from long-standing family recipes which have been handed down the generations, with the lengthy cooking process as much of a tradition as the spectacle of flaming it at the dinner table, before dolloping brandy butter on top.

When done right, it's sticky and dense, warmly spiced and distinctively dark in colour. While raisins, suet, brown sugar, spices and brandy can be found in most modern variations, the sweet, cake-like nature of today’s pudding is a far cry from its early incarnations. Spanning back as far as the 14th century and adopting several names along the way, recipes for Christmas pudding’s predecessors have evolved over the years, reflecting changes in cooking techniques, ingredients that the average home cook could get their hands on and festive traditions.

The original blueprint for Christmas pudding was frumenty, a dish which in texture was similar to porridge and was commonly eaten across medieval western Europe. In its most basic form, it was made from grains, boiled with water or milk and thickened with breadcrumbs, though more affluent families added meat such as beef or mutton, sweetened it with sugar and dried fruits and added spices such as cinnamon and saffron. It was served as a pottage, similar to a thick soup, and, rather than the post-dinner pudding we know today, is believed to have been eaten at Easter and as a fasting meal before Christmas festivities began.

In the early 15th century it became better known as plum pottage. This consisted of a mixture of meats, grains, spices and fruits (particularly raisins and currants, rather than plums) which was boiled in a bag – the fact that it didn’t require an oven made it popular among poorer families. Over time, more thickening was added, firming up its texture and inspiring its name change to plum pudding. And when sugar became cheaper and better meat preserving techniques were developed (until this point meat had often been stuffed in animals’ stomachs for preservation), creating sweet and savoury versions of dishes became easier; as the savoury side of plum pudding began to dwindle, it was replaced instead by sweeter elements.

By the mid-17th century, plum pudding's links with Christmas were so well-established that it was temporarily banned by the Puritan parliament, along with anything else deemed to be glutinous – traditional festive merriment was replaced by somewhat more sombre religious contemplation. Bah, humbug.