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The Hotel Book of Puddings

Considering with what reluctance the public are said to read prefaces, it seems quite fortunate that puddings are such familiar things and there is next to nothing to be said about them; and, besides, they constitute such a remarkably numerous family--race Burns called it--that if only they all have to speak for themselves there will be quite a time. And that reflection alone must give us pause, for among them are some such hoary patriarchs, venerable relics of antiquity, as would hardly brook any levity from us the creatures of yesterday. Suppose one should say to some of these old respectabilities, "You old relics, you are heavy, you are indigestible; you are a black, unwholesome lump; you should be made over, shaken up, renovated like an old hotel; would they not rise up and annihiliate us with, 'Pass, little mortal, pass, Thy days are but as grass.' But we were `Formed ages since, perhaps before the flood, We nurtured the stout dryads of the wood.' Every one must have observed how natural it seems for artists to draw puddings with faces, especially Christmas plum puddings--depend upon it, there is something in it. If it would be such a heinous piece of presumption to attempt to change the nature of the old plum pudding, is it not almost as bad to change its form? There is not much poetry about puddings, but what little mite there is belongs to the old time round pudding boiled in a bag. The tall fellow in fine fluted moulds is an upstart. A writer in the Bazar--it may be three years since--traced back the plum pudding to its infancy, when it was only porridge--a sort of porridge with plums in it; but it grew out of that, and although occasionally through the accident of coming untied in the kettle it relapses temporarily into its early state, it is respectable and to memory dear only as a pudding round and solid. In the sanctum where these lines are written--one that is next neighbor to all out of doors, looking off "where wilds immeasureably spread seem lengthening as you go"--there is upon the wall a picture from Harper's Weekly of a Christmas at sea--"the pride of the ship's cook." He is carrying the plum pudding himself to the captain's cabin; none of the boys may touch that. The picture is hung up a little askew in order to straighten up the cook. It makes but little difference which way one hangs a picture of a vessel on a rolling sea, but the cook looks a little reeling, and that pudding must be kept right side up at all hazards. Let no one entertain the least question about that pudding, it is the traditional sort, dark and solid and round, and the holly is sticking in the top; the glossy, sharp-spiked, red-berried English holly; brought from shore when the vessel started and carefully kept for the day. Who could dare lay innovating hands upon the composition of that ancient pudding? Here it is.