Moist cake tastes best when it's fresh when it's no more than — say, a day out of the oven. But our traditional holiday cake is an exception to this general rule. Christmas fruit cake improves with age. The rich spicy fruit mixture "grows mellow" on standing, as old-time cooks would explain. The fact is that the various ingredients "blend in flavor as they stand together making that special taste for which this cake is so famous.
This holds true also for pudding. Most pudding is best when fresh. But real Christmas plum pudding grows better if it has time to "ripen."
Ho wonder, then, that good English housewives consider the last of November and the early days of December the stirring days of the year — the zero hour for mixing and cooking Yuletide cake and pudding.
As a matter of fact, the British call the last Sunday in November "Stir Up Sunday." The name came from the collect read on that day in the Church of England which begins: "Stir Tip, we beseech Thee, the wills of Thy faithful people." But the story goes that the women in the congregation usually take that challenge to heart as a reference to the stirring that should be going on in their kitchens in preparation for Christmas.n order to honor the three Wise Men, pudding is traditionally stir from East to West by every member of the family.
American housewives are also at the job of making fruit cake and plum pudding at this season, and they're making them not only for their own use but also for Christmas gifts or for sale. Homemade fruit cake and plum pudding is a source of considerable income to many homemakers these days. For example, in Alabama members of the home demonstration club have made a real business of selling Alabama fruit cake that features home-grown ingredients.
