Fruit Puddings, Sweet Pancakes and Dumplings

Hallo! A great deal of steam! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house, and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered: flushed, but smiling proudly: with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half a quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding!

CHARLES DICKENS, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, 1843