Who Said Plum Pudding?

The trophy on the following page, dense as a cannonball but many times larger, certainly fulfills all of the Victorian era fantasies about marvelous size and Yuletide grandeur. Yet let’s be realistic: I rather doubt our Christmas cook could lift it. I suspect she had some trouble boiling it, considering that a small one required about six hours of steady cooking. And I am certain that dyspepsia followed, although it was slow to dampen the old-time passion for anything made with “plums.”