Christmas Victorian Bakers

Nothing says traditional Christmas like a Victorian scene.

And yet, many of the festive customs which we think of as essential

didn't exist at all at the start of the 19th century.

Christmas as we know it was largely invented by the Victorians,

as four professional bakers are about to find out for themselves.

They've already travelled through 19th-century history together,

and experienced the tough realities of their trade

during an era of seismic change.

Now, they're cooking up a truly historic Christmas.

This is the richest pudding I've ever tasted.

They'll attempt long-lost recipes...

That just looks like a shambles.

It's rubbish, isn't it?

..make festive favourites with surprising ingredients...

Oh, my God, this smells like cat food!

..and experience how the upper crust celebrated Christmas.

Gluttony or what?

-Oh...

-My goodness!

-Oh, oh, oh.

By partying from the start of Victoria's reign...

-Wassail!

-ALL:

-Drink ale!

..right through to its end,

they'll discover how our favourite holiday,

like so much else in British life, was transformed forever.

The Victorians are the ones that shaped Christmas.

At Blists Hill Victorian Museum in Shropshire,

four 21st-century professionals are heading back to Christmas past.

Among them, artisan baker Duncan Glendinning.

Christmas is the one time of year where people flood

into bakeries around the country.

It represents mince pies, it represents Christmas cake,

Christmas pudding. All those things that you couldn't imagine

British Christmas without.

John Foster is escaping from the large modern factory he runs.

We'll be making, this Christmas, about 300,000-400,000 mince pies.

Harpreet Baura specialises in upscale cakes.

Even though I'm a Sikh, I actually love Christmas.

It's my favourite time of the year.

And John Swift's family have been baking since Victorian times.

The perfect Victorian Christmas...

There's got to be massive amounts of baked goods and even more alcohol.

To begin with, they'll experience what Christmas was like

when young Queen Victoria began her reign.

At that point, Yuletide rituals were much the same as they had been

for centuries, though sweeping changes were just around the corner.

Happy Christmas!

Except it's not quite Christmas as we know it yet.

In 1837, things were a little bit different.

For example, there was no Christmas cake yet,

Santa Claus was basically unheard of,

and also very few people sat down to turkey for their Christmas dinner.

And there were no Christmas cards,

the Christmas cracker had yet to be invented

and you wouldn't have found your early Victorian British family

setting up a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve.

No man down the chimney?

-How depressing!

-Must have a been right miserable set, then.

Look, don't get too depressed,

because instead of celebrating their Christmas on Christmas Day

and Boxing Day, as we do today, the early Victorians celebrated

their Christmas over 12 days - the famous 12 days of Christmas.

-Oh, brilliant.

-Which means as bakers, you're going to be baking

for the entire season.

And you're going to be doing it in this shop here.

So come and have a look around!

'Over the whole 12 days, from December the 25th onwards,

'food and drink were central to the celebrations.'

Even poor families would treat themselves to things they usually

couldn't afford, such as meat.

So butchers did great business, as did grocers.

But not every trade was in such demand.

The business challenge for Victorian bakers at Christmas

was that this was the one time of year when people were eating less

of your staple - bread - and turning towards more speciality foods.

So the real money in baked goods is in producing cakes and pies.

One of the real money-spinners was a thing called Twelfth Cake,

eaten on Twelfth Night.

Now, today Twelfth Night's a fairly sad affair,

where you take down the decorations and feel depressed

about going back to work and being on a diet,

but back in the early Victorian period, it was a wonderful occasion.

Something which to many people was even more important and exciting

than Christmas itself.

Twelfth Night was notorious for lawless excess

and was pagan in origin.

The church had piggybacked on the popularity

of the ancient midwinter rituals by linking them to

the feast of Epiphany - the arrival of the Three Kings.

That's why crowns sometimes decorated the massive Twelfth Cakes,

which were eaten at parties across Britain well into the 19th century,

but which are unknown to modern bakers.

This whole Twelfth Night thing... I'll be honest, totally new on me.

It's a new one on me.

I've never made a Twelfth Cake.

New one on me!

-No, nothing.

-Right, shall we get cracking?

Let's do this.

40lbs of fine flour.

Yeah.

12 nutmegs.

As ever, the bakers are working to historic recipes.

Have a smell of that. That's cloves.

That's Christmas right there, isn't it?

-That's mulled wine, isn't it? You can't drink that just yet.

-No!

4lbs of raisins of the sun, stoned.

Lovely.

At a time when most British people still lived in the countryside,

and agriculture was far more central to our economy,

what we ate was more seasonal.

32lbs of currants.

Since fresh produce was scarce in midwinter,

dried fruit was ideal for Christmas recipes.

Is anyone else thinking this is a lot of currants?

-It is a lot of currants.

-That's a lot of currants.

Victorian bakers, as well as cooking with dried fruits,

sold them raw to customers at Christmas.

For most Britons at that time,

they'd have been a rare sweet treat compared to the usual diet of bread,

potatoes and a little meat.

4lbs of fine sugar.

Sugar, by contrast, was still relatively expensive,

so is used much more sparingly in this recipe.

To modern eyes, Victorian cake bakers sometimes look

more like bread bakers, relying, for instance, on fresh yeast

from the beer making process.

Turning to our brewer friends to sort us out

with the magic ingredient.

Oh, that is a lovely pint!

Look how bubbly that is.

And in you go. Are you ready?

If you think about a cake, you wouldn't think about yeast.

But I mean these days, the classic thing is we'd use baking powder.

Think of the taste of the beer.

-That...

-Yeah.

-That to me is a good idea.

The recipe then calls for extensive hand mixing.

This is...

quite physical considering it's a cake, isn't it?

I mean, it's back to our bread baking days, basically.

To bake the size of cake Victorian customers would expect,

we've custom-made special tins, or hoops, as they called them.

I mean, that's a right big cake.

You're not going to get much bigger than that, are you? Look.

Come on.

'Actually, John's wrong about that.'

Don't forget the piece de resistance.

Oh, my God.

Your recipe talks about a cake tin being half a yard over.

Well, this is half a yard over.

I've never make a cake that big in the entire time

I've run my business. That is huge!

You know, if you're a Victorian, bigger is always better.

You want a huge cake in the window to bring in trade.

One Victorian shop advertised a Twelfth Cake

18 feet in circumference.

Another sold a specimen that literally weighed a tonne.

Ready? Oh, that's got some weight to it!

It's a bit heavy, isn't it?

Twelfth Cakes take days to complete.

After baking and cooling, they'll need icing and decorating.

But while they're in the oven,

the bakers can make another centuries-old festive recipe,

one which we're much more familiar with today.

Back then, however, mince pies contained ingredients

we no longer use.

Oh, my lord. What is that?

What we've got here is the whole range of meats

that you might find in mincemeat pies in the Victorian period.

-We've got our good old friend - the tongue.

-Nice.

-Oh!

We've also got, here, another popular filling,

was calves' feet as well.

Boiled up and shredded down, put in your pie.

Bone, sinew, gristle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What we'd quite like you to do is to experiment with recipes

from the top and the bottom of society.

Meet Charles Elme Francatelli -

cook to Queen Victoria, celebrity chef of his day,

author of cookbooks.

This one, The Modern Cook, his high-end cookbook,

has a recipe for royal mincemeat, which uses roast beef.

And this, a plain cookery book for the working classes, uses tripe.

Tripe, this is a cow's stomach lining.

This really is bottom end of the market.

Roast beef, right up there at the top of the market.

So it's going to be really interesting for us to see

if there's a difference in taste as well.

Duncan and John Swift start on the premium product...

..while John Foster and Harpreet tackle the budget mincemeat.

Oh, my God, this is so disgusting!

It's wobbling as I'm cutting it, look!

It smells like cat food.

What gave the pies their name was the need to mince the meat

into tiny pieces.

Basically, you just need to hack it, hack it to bits,

as small as possible, really.

You've got something to hack, but I'm trying to chop slime.

The only animal-based products still used in some 21st-century mincemeat

is suet, the hard fat from beef or mutton,

often taken from around the kidneys.

In our factory, it's all vegetarian, so we have vegetarian suet.

This is the real thing.

-This is the real deal.

-What we're making is the modern...

-Travesty.

-..travesty, isn't it?

You know, so this is the genuine stuff.

So, do you think this is going to taste better?

Personally, I think this might not taste better,

but, hey, I'm open-minded.

The ingredients in the Royale recipe cost at least four times as much

as the working man's mixture.

As well as the finer meat, the posh version adds a pint of spirits.

This is the port.

I just can't believe the difference from the rich side

to the poor side.

We have a pauper's amount of alcohol.

-Literally...

-Zilcho!

-Just that!

-Outrageous.

This one's brandy.

LAUGHTER

I tell you what, I'm starting to feel a bit...

-I'm...

-..heady.

-..woozy from all this booze. Yeah, I mean...

Go on, get some more in.

We'll see whose is best. We'll see!

-Oh!

-THEY LAUGH

The alcohol, sugar and spices act as preservatives for the meat.

The dried fruit has a long life, too.

That meant mincemeat was available when fresher produce

was out of season.

Which is why mince pies have been made at Christmas

since medieval times.

I want to be excited about this, but this is...

-Oh, it's just the meat!

-No.

-Oh, the meat and the suet smells...

-No, I don't think that...

-Oh!

-I don't...

I think that's actually...

-Oh!

-THEY LAUGH

A Victorian mince pie could sell for as little as a penny,

or as much as 8p.

That's about £1.50 today.

For top whack, you'd expect butter-rich puff pastry,

whilst poorer customers were served shortcrust.

Mince pies were a strong seller for any baker,

because they were in demand throughout the festive period.

In Yorkshire, eating a mince pie on each of the 12 days of Christmas

was believed to bring good luck for the coming year.

These look amazing.

'But which of ours will taste best?

'We begin with the tripe-based budget range.'

It's actually all right.

-That's a mince pie.

-I actually really like that.

They're much tastier than I thought they would be.

And the fact that we were putting that sloppy goo into this

made me just think, "There's no way on Earth..."

-That's tripe.

-Yeah. But actually, there's no hint of tripe.

Do you know what, it doesn't taste savoury.

It tastes sweet.

But are things going to get better with our Royale mince pies?

Let's go for it then, shall we?

You can taste the fact that these have got beef in them,

and that they're a mince-MEAT pie.

In actual fact, that is a very complex taste, but it works.

There would be a percentage of people that love them.

I mean, put gravy with that, I'm in heaven.

It's... That... There's a richness to it, isn't there?

There's definitely a richness to it

-that comes in through the beef.

-Yeah.

-So it is a different pie...

-Yeah, yeah.

-..to the modern pie.

-And better.

-It is far better than that.

-Yeah.

-I think there's something really nice that

sends a bit of a shiver down your spine when you think,

"I'm eating something that I know that the Queen of England

"ate over 100 years ago."

If Queen Victoria ate these, why did she look so bloody miserable

all the time?

The next day, the giant Twelfth Cakes have cooled

after their time in the oven.

-Wow.

-Now that's...

-Look at that for a beast.

..the biggest one.

Victorians did not do things by half measures, did they?

Now they need icing.

The historic recipe calls for egg whites to be whisked

for two or three hours.

Mmm... It's not peaked enough, really, is it?

Not really.

It's too sloppy.

Just here for my muscle.

-Whip harder!

-Yes.

The resulting mixture is more like meringue than the Royal icing

which we'd use in the modern world,

but which wasn't known in early Victorian Britain.

Instead of being laid onto marzipan,

this icing was often put straight onto the cake.

And it won't harden until it's baked in the oven.

And sometimes, not even then.

Oh, my God!

The top's all right.

That's hideous. How can you say this is all right?

The top is fine.

-But we've just had...

-We'll sort it.

-Yeah.

-What the...?

-Oh, my goodness.

-Oh, my word.

-Oh.

-It's rubbish, isn't it?

-Yeah.

What not to do in Victorian baking!

I'm so disappointed with this.

I think that this is actually hideous,

and I wish that we could figure out what we have done wrong

so that we could try and do their cakes justice.

So, do another layer of the meringue mix.

-Yeah.

-Get it back in the oven, baked off before we decorate it.

Shh! Keep it a secret, don't tell anybody.

Like many historic recipes,

this one hadn't specified details

such as the precise texture of the icing required,

nor the length of time needed in the oven.

So, when it comes to checking if their latest attempt is set,

John's taking no chances.

Is it warm in there?

Yeah, a little bit.

You got it?

HE SIGHS

-On the table?

-Yeah.

Well, it's a little coloured, isn't it?

I think that looks like a royal mess, rather than a royal cake.

That just looks like a shambles by our standards

of what we consider to be a good cake now.

But look at it from the Victorian point, and I think,

personally speaking, that's Bob on.

It's held together, you've got a nice edge.

You've got a clean top.

At the end of the day, yet again, new recipes, new techniques.

-Or new to us, anyway.

-New skills.

And we only had one run at it.

I think this is going to need a lot of decoration

to jazz it up on the outside.

Twelfth Cakes were often more elaborately decorated

than anything we have today.

This was the scene on top of Queen Victoria's in 1849.

Everything here was made from a mixture of sugar and gum.

Our bakers' sugar figurines

have been cast from antique confectioner's moulds.

And for design inspiration,

they've turned to a historic account of Twelfth Cake favourites.

"Dragons, trees, fish, palaces, cats and dogs, churches, milkmaids,

"knights and innumerable other forms in snow-white confectionery,

"painted with variegated colours."

It's not very kind of Christmas decorations as we know it, is it?

No. Milkmaids.

There was a milkmaid in there, yeah?

On the 12 days of Christmas.

Maids a-milking.

Cakes weren't put on sale until Twelfth Day itself,

then generally held to be the 6th of January.

It's chuffin' heavy, this cake, isn't it?

It's the heaviest cake I've ever picked up.

But that really does look magnificent.

HE GROANS

Be interesting to see, whoever buys it, how they get it home.

Yeah!

According to one contemporary account,

"Scarcely a shop that offers a half-penny bun is without finery

"in the windows on Twelfth Day."

Even budget bakers would cash in by sprinkling sugar

on top of their rolls.

Start it from the back.

Yes, yeah. The middle of the thing, to go round the back.

I mean, that looks really quite good, that.

Bakers were pioneers of the kind of Christmas window display

we now expect from department stores.

Crowds flocked to what was sometimes called All Cakes Day.

And doesn't it make it feel so cosy in our bakery

-when it's all cold and snowy outside?

-It does. It's Christmas.

Staff dressed up specially for the occasion - fine lace for the women,

buttonholes for the men.

As darkness fell in the mid-afternoon,

the flickering candles and gaslight created a magical atmosphere.

This looks fantastic!

It looks so Victorian,

with everything framed in the panes of the windows like this.

-Looks pretty good, that!

-It's a feast for the eyes.

There's so much going on.

Just imagine the faces of the children,

pressed up against the window.

We know from pictures that there used to be great crowds of people

around windows like this, all gawping,

even if they couldn't afford the cakes within.

There's a serious point as well,

because this is a day when bakers can really make a lot of money.

In London, there was one confectioner

whose cakes would retail at anything from half a guinea

all the way up to £20.

Now, £20 back then is more than the average baker would make in a year.

So this really was a moneymaking opportunity.

Gets my vote if you're going to earn that much money.

It's also the fact that you can continue to indulge

-well into the New Year.

-Yeah.

Whereas for us, at the moment, 1st of January, it means diet,

budget, you know, you're cutting back on everything.

Precisely the time in the modern world

we're thinking about our gym subscription,

the Victorians are thinking about a big blowout cake feast.

When Britain was still predominantly rural,

bakers would typically have lived in small country dwellings.

So this is where the team will throw the kind of party

at which their cakes would have been enjoyed.

While some of them start decorating,

the others set to work making

the traditional Twelfth Night punch, wassail.

One of the essential flavourings is nutmeg...

..while the main ingredient is warmed ale.

Oh, that's smelling good!

-Yeah?

-It needs a bit of sweetness, though.

-Hello!

-Smells nice.

I've got another ingredient for your drink.

-This.

-Something we haven't seen for a while.

We're putting that in punch?

Yes, you are. It will add flavour.

-OK.

-And a little bit of colour, and a little bit of texture.

Bread in a drink?

I'm confused.

There are loads of variations of recipes for wassail.

They've got a very long heritage.

A lot of medieval recipes called for bread,

so that's one of the reasons it's in there.

Even different villages might have their own version of it.

This particular wassail recipe was a favourite in Cumberland.

The spiced ale needs to be mixed with bread

that's been soaked in milk.

I'm a lager man generally, and I'm a little bit, you know...

-Bit concerned.

-Is this something like eggnog,

or something like nowadays?

Do you know what? This reminds me more of bread and butter pudding.

Actually, by the end of the Victorian period,

this kind of recipe evolves into

thickened egg custards, almost trifle.

So exactly this, booze, milk, you know...

What I like about this as well, is having done a long day's graft,

this isn't only going to make us merry,

it's also going to fill us up a bit.

-Yeah. You've got to fend off the cold somehow.

-Yeah.

You know what's missing, John, is the Christmas tree

-twinkling in the corner.

-I know.

And that's what's really lacking here.

It should be right there.

While no ordinary British family had Christmas trees at this time,

hanging up evergreens like holly and ivy

had been a winter ritual since pagan times.

I think it looks quite classy.

-Yeah.

-Compared to the Technicolor kitsch that you can get these days,

maybe this is the way forward.

Yeah. And being a Yorkshireman, I'm very, very frugal.

If I could convince the family not to buy any decorations

but to just gather it from around, I could save a fortune!

-Mm!

-Looks like porridge.

-Eurgh!

-That is a curdley kind of mush.

It is a very strange combination.

It looks strange.

You first.

Make sure you get a bit of everything!

-Cheers.

-Merry Christmas.

Good times.

Every sense is going, "That's not...

"That's not right in my mouth."

But in actual fact, it's...

-Yeah, it is sweet.

-Very sweet.

And it tastes like a...

It tastes like breakfast.

-I don't know...

-It tastes like the milk

-of a really sweet breakfast cereal.

-Yeah.

-But with beer.

Yeah.

It's a bit odd, though.

It is odd, isn't it? But it's nice, actually.

Sometimes, the bread was grilled before being added to punch.

Its presence in party drinks is what gives us the phrase,

"to raise a toast".

-Wassail!

-ALL:

-Drink ale!

In the early years of Victoria's reign,

many people still practised this call and response drinking ritual,

which dated back to Saxon times.

-Wassail!

-ALL:

-Drink ale!

"Wassail" means "be healthy" in old English.

-Wassail!

-ALL:

-Drink ale!

-I got a bit of bread.

-There we are, you're the "toast" of the party.

Hey!

Actually very traditionally,

certainly in the south-west of the country,

which is an apple-growing area, it's a cider-producing area,

we would actually be doing this out in the orchard

to banish the evil spirits from our apple trees.

It is a lingering pagan practice

that we see right up into the 19th century,

and that's really what the sort of Twelfth Night festivities

were all about, about looking back to our pagan past.

-Ah, the cake.

-Oh, wow!

Hey! Look at that, that looks absolutely delicious.

My word, I am hungry.

-That's a feast.

-Look at that.

This is a proper treat cake.

I mean, look at the size of this as well.

-And the smell.

-It does smell lovely.

-It's really good, doesn't it?

-It smells good to us.

-Imagine what it must have smelled...

-I know.

-..you know, to kids back in 1830 to have smelled that.

-Yeah, yeah.

It is just a little bit dry, which is why

I think the punch is the perfect accompaniment.

But this is absolutely the cake we have in Yorkshire at Christmas,

with this texture, with this density of fruit.

This is Yorkshire Christmas spice cake.

This is it. Exactly as I remember it,

except it's a bit more powerful than I remember it.

This is it.

After the cake, people would play parlour games.

Though the bakers enter into the Victorian spirit,

some of them are missing the festivities we're so familiar with.

Squeak, piggy, squeak!

If it wasn't actually for the holly and the decorations,

we wouldn't have even known that that was Christmas.

Eee!

'I had this preconception of Victorian Christmas,'

and it's nothing like what it's supposed to be in my head.

THEY LAUGH

'There were still elements that I thought were really positive.

'It was more about enjoying yourself

'with the people that were close to you,'

rather than the commercialisation

of what Christmas came to be like later,

and what it's actually like now.

Whoo!

'It was a lot less dressed up,

'and it was more about getting a bit raucous,'

having a few drinks and having a whole lot of fun.

That's Duncan, isn't it?

No!

LAUGHTER

'What I did like was the fact that the festivities went on

'for the 12 days of Christmas.'

These days, it's a little bit "Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am,"

and it's over.

And I'd actually like to see it go on for 12 days!

That would be a good tradition to revive, I think.

-I'll drink to that.

-Wahey!

So why did we give up celebrating Twelfth Night?

Parties like this were widespread at the start of Victoria's reign,

but a couple of generations later were just a memory.

Christmas was caught up in the same revolution which transformed

so many other aspects of British life -

industrialisation.

Barely a decade after Victoria became queen,

Britain became the world's first urban economy,

where more of the population lived in towns than in the countryside.

The traditional 12 days of Christmas made sense for a rural winter.

The ground was too hard to work, the days were too short

and you needed that time to relax

after the hardships of the agricultural year.

But this clashed with the work patterns of a fast industrialising

and factory-based economy.

In 1761, there were no less than 47 bank holidays,

days when the Bank of England was closed.

But by 1830, that number had diminished to a mere four.

As people moved to new jobs in towns,

families and communities were split across the country,

making it much harder to come together for a 12-day celebration.

And the new urban Christmas could be very bleak indeed,

something dramatised

by Hans Christian Andersen's 1840s bestseller,

The Little Match Girl.

It ends with her dying in the snow, ignored by the merrymaking rich.

The Industrial Revolution created opportunities

for people to make lots of money,

but it also created lots of opportunities

for people to be exploited.

And what we see in the mid-Victorian period

is the gap between the rich and the poor widen.

It's time for our bakers to experience

something of those extremes.

BELL TINKLES

Get your muffins!

The unluckiest Victorian bakers

spent their Christmases out on the freezing streets.

If they were too old or weak

for the arduous business of kneading dough by hand,

they'd instead buy cheap products wholesale

and attempt to sell them on for a small profit.

Muffins were only in demand during the coldest months of winter.

Get your muffins!

When I were younger, cold, it didn't bother me.

But now as I'm getting a bit older, it does bother me.

Me back's hurting, me arms are aching.

I keep swapping it like this, and even that one's aching.

My head is starting to ache.

I'd rather be in the bakery with an oven.

The muffin man was such a familiar figure on Victorian streets

that he turns up in a popular nursery rhyme.

But his life was far from child's play.

A street trader typically earned a mere four shillings a week,

a third of what even the lowest paid indoor baker would make.

Duncan and John, meanwhile,

are sampling life at the other end of the social scale.

Some bakers found work in grand country houses.

Charlecote Park near Warwick

still has a working Victorian kitchen wing -

the perfect place to bake what was known as a Yorkshire Christmas pie.

Just put these ones in here.

Queen Victoria had one of these every Christmas.

Look at the volume.

I mean, gluttony or what?

I mean, it's just...!

The dish was an opportunity to show off your estate's game reserves.

Duncan and John are using goose, partridge, pheasants, grouse,

woodcocks, turkey, pigeons and widgeons.

What's a widgeon when it's at home?

It's a type of duck.

I mean, can you imagine the cost of this today?

-It's obscene.

-And then look what I'm chucking in!

Three or four sliced truffles.

It is insane.

There's so much poverty in Victorian Britain

and you've got enough meat on the table for a family of ten

to probably live for about six months.

The recipe's author, royal chef Francatelli again,

admits that the quantities may appear extravagant,

but says they're necessary for

"Wealthy epicures who keep up the good old English style

"at this season of good cheer."

It wasn't even a main dish.

It's a buffet item for the sideboard,

in case people got peckish between their seven-course meals.

Harpreet, meanwhile,

has less appetising pastries for a pauper's Christmas.

Flayer cakes were made from the cheapest fat

that could be flayed from a pig or sheep.

Oh, dear.

So there is basically no taste to this at all.

It's really basic.

There is no sugar, there are a few currants in there for flavour,

but even they don't have much flavour to them.

And so, to me, this is almost the antithesis of Christmas.

They're so basic.

According to historic accounts,

sometimes the lard wasn't even cooked.

Given how cold it is, maybe the lard in this would keep you warm.

And if you were quite down and out yourself,

you'd need a bit of energy. But other than that,

there isn't much of a selling point to these in any way.

After their very different Christmases,

the bakers return to base to compare notes.

This is what John and I have been off doing.

-Wow.

-That looks amazing.

I'm just so glad that when the oven door was opened, you didn't see...

-Meat.

-..birds spilled out onto the oven floor.

Trying to escape.

Let's do this.

Good grief!

You'd need a sword!

-Oh!

-My goodness.

Look at the layers.

You can actually still see all the different layers of birds,

with their sausage meat around the outside.

You know, for bakers like us of the era,

this is a privilege actually cutting into it,

because the reality is that we wouldn't have had the chance

-to really eat any of it.

-Too good for the likes of us.

This is a different world from what we were doing,

because this seems so opulent.

And what we were doing today was pushing out

some really cruddy products.

But that's the extremes of Victorian, isn't it?

It is the super-rich can do whatever they like,

and the super-poor hang on to life by their fingernails.

In the harsh economic realities of the new industrial age,

many people began to fear that Christmas had no place.

It was indulgent, unproductive and inefficient.

As one famous businessmen notoriously put it,

"I can't afford to pay to make idle men merry."

But others were determined to save Christmas,

and helped reinvent it for the new industrial age.

This is where Charles Dickens lived

during the first years of Victoria's reign,

and wrote some of his most successful novels.

In this room, the children's nursery,

Dickens held Twelfth Night parties for family and friends.

Now, Dickens loved Christmas.

He loved the games, he loved the food,

the drink and the good cheer.

And he poured much of the love that he created here

into his Christmas stories.

The most famous of these was an immediate bestseller

when it was published in 1843.

For Dickens and his readers, Christmas represented an escape,

an antidote to the horrors of Victorian urban life,

and the kind of squalor that he documented so movingly

in his other publications.

But it also represented, in a rapidly changing world,

a sense of tradition and stability.

Literacy rates improved throughout the Victorian era

and then, as now, books made popular presents,

so publishers increasingly targeted the Christmas market

with all sorts of publications.

Periodicals and magazines were the mass media sensation of their day.

And a little bit like television today,

people looked out for the Christmas special.

The Illustrated London News was

the Victorian equivalent of "Hello!" magazine

and in 1848, it published a glimpse into royal life at Windsor,

including one picture that was to prove to be

extraordinarily influential.

It showed the family with a Christmas tree,

long common in Prince Albert's native Germany,

but largely unknown here,

except among immigrants and the aristocracy.

The image sparked a national craze for trees,

especially among the middle classes,

who bought magazines and aspired to the ideal

of respectable family life.

The growing mass media and commerce

were now shaping the British experience of Christmas.

A'wight, treacle?

Oh, my God, this is getting quite tough now.

Enterprising bakers were also quick to cash in on new Christmas trends.

Ours are making gingerbread ornaments

because Queen Victoria was known to hang them on the royal tree.

There you are, it's snowing into our gingerbread.

They're using gingerbread moulds from the 19th century.

I mean, these are beautiful,

but they're a little bit different to what we use now.

And I don't think they're all that practical, to be honest.

Urgh, OK, so we don't actually have any of his features on this one.

These do take a bit of practice.

It's not really working.

But persistence pays off.

Let's see if this comes out.

Yeah, it worked.

That looks good. Excellent.

I would love it if someone gave me this for Christmas.

-Yeah.

-There's so much in Victorian food that's art.

I think that the shapes that we make now as modern-day

really don't do these justice at all.

We've got really cartoony ones like reindeer's heads and Mrs Santa.

We've got a little naughty Santa with body parts showing.

-LAUGHTER

-But they are more comedy value.

Fully in the spirit of Christmas, yeah? Naughty Santa.

Gingerbread had long been eaten throughout the year in Britain

but was seen as a particularly festive food in Germany.

Thousands of German bakers migrated to work here in the 19th century

and may, like Prince Albert,

have brought their Christmas tastes with them.

Doesn't it seem odd that all of the things we associate with Christmas

that weren't there before, aren't actually the British influence?

They seem to be more typically German.

Yeah. I mean, the royal family is massively important at this point,

isn't it? And they're setting the trend.

This does start to mirror image the vision I have in my head

of Victorian Christmas. This is actually starting to get exciting.

A small bakery like ours could sell freshly made Christmas gingerbread

to its local customers.

But as the Victorian era progressed,

they increasingly had to compete with much bigger businesses.

Biscuits were particularly suited to factory production

and the Victorian period saw the creation of mass-produced brands

such as McVitie's and Peek Frean.

These new national firms could invest in marketing

on an unprecedented scale, which is how biscuits,

which had no particular history of festive associations,

came to be promoted as a Christmas essential.

-So here we've got the list of Christmas biscuits.

-Mmm.

I just can't get over how many different varieties

of biscuits there are.

They sound quite grand and there's a lot of mention of overseas places,

Naples, Nice.

-Some of these are biscuits that we can buy today.

-Nice.

-Biarritz.

And, of course, the issue is that

they've gone into mass production now.

That means the price is coming down.

They can get the professionalism that you can't get on a small scale.

And that's the problem.

We cannot compete with biscuits like this.

The biggest and most pioneering of the biscuit manufacturers

were Huntley & Palmers.

Their factory employed 5,000 people by the 1890s.

Not all of them were bakers.

Some of them made tins.

The Victorians invented the tradition, still with us today,

of the Christmas selection box.

These tins held the key to the success

of the Huntley & Palmers business

and they're an example, par excellence,

of the way in which technology was changing

not only the way we produced food,

but the way we packaged, distributed and marketed it.

Each year, a brand-new range of Christmas tins

was unveiled to stimulate demand.

They weren't just airtight containers to keep food fresh.

They were desirable in their own right,

and were kept in homes for years

after the contents had been devoured.

It was developments in tin plating and moulding

that allowed these tins to be mass produced.

And also in the 1870s,

developments in lithography allowed for these multicoloured designs

to be printed onto the tins.

The ability to produce objects of this quality

at an affordable price was wondrous for the Victorians.

Mass production of designs this complex

would still be challenging today.

Buying a Huntley & Palmers biscuit at Christmas

was about more than buying a foodstuff.

It was about buying into the late-Victorian fashion

for mass-manufactured goods.

There was one other crucial factor in the firm's success.

TRAIN WHISTLE TOOTS

In 1841,

Isambard Kingdom Brunel's famous Great Western Railway

started running through Huntley & Palmers' hometown of Reading.

The railways not only delivered coal, iron and passengers,

they also conveyed the humble biscuit.

And in time, they were to deliver to Britain

an altogether new type of Christmas.

Huntley & Palmers built their factory

right on the new railway line,

and used their private sidings and rolling stock to send their products

all over the empire.

The portability and long life of biscuits

also made them an ideal gift for people taking the train back

to see their families at Christmas.

And if you weren't able to make it home in person,

you could now rely on the postal train...

WHISTLE TOOTS

..to deliver another great Christmas custom invented by the Victorians.

This is something very rare indeed.

It's the very first commercially produced Christmas card.

It's one of a thousand printed in 1843,

the time at which Dickens was publishing his Christmas Carol.

Three, maybe even four generations of a family

sat round all enjoying a glass of port or sherry.

There's even a little girl there being allowed her first sip.

This new concept of sending a Christmas card

didn't take off immediately.

And that's partly because, whilst these cards were being printed,

all of the colour was being added by hand.

This made them unaffordable to most people.

But in the passing decades, the costs were to come down,

thanks partly due to the innovations in colour printing technology

used by Huntley & Palmers.

As a consequence, the Christmas card, like the biscuit tin,

went from being a novelty

to being more of a widespread Christmas tradition.

WHISTLE TOOTS

However rapidly Britain and its landscape was changing,

at least the new railways could be relied upon to bring us cards,

presents and loved ones at Christmas.

It's the bakers' final day in the 19th century.

By the end of Queen Victoria's reign,

the Christmas we know and love today has essentially taken shape.

Instead of being 12 days, it's now focused on the two days

we know today, so Christmas Day and Boxing Day,

the two public holidays when most people would get the day off.

And family members who may have been working far away could,

through the railways, get back to their family home.

The Christmas of this time becomes very much a family affair.

Except, as bakers, you're going to be working on Christmas Day,

open because you're going to be providing crucial elements

for many people's Christmas dinners.

But don't worry, later on in the evening

you will get a chance to let your hair down and enjoy what to us

has become a traditional Christmas.

Although to the Victorians, many elements were very modern indeed.

Better get on, then.

Instead of a Twelfth Cake in January,

now customers demanded Christmas cakes in December.

These were smaller, sweeter and moister

than their old-fashioned predecessors.

They were also differently decorated.

A layer of marzipan was now the norm,

topped with royal icing,

a technique which German bakers had popularised

from the mid-century onwards.

If you compare this white, glossy,

sheeny cake to those meringuey Twelfth Cakes, they're worlds apart.

This is more like a cake as I know it.

Made with much finer sugar,

the new icing hardened without baking

and could be used for all the decorating.

Moulded sugar ornaments fell out of favour.

Now the fashion was for abstract patterns and piped-on text.

These are the Christmas greetings of Victorian times, which...

It's not "Merry Christmas", is it?

No. So here we've got

"God's blessings make thy Christmas bright."

-That's kind of important.

-And here we've got

"May Christmas joys fill your heart today."

They are a bit of a mouthful,

but then it would allow the confectioner

to show off their piping prowess.

And nowadays you might have 20 cakes in a shop

that would all say "Merry Christmas" or "Season's Greetings"...

-Exactly.

-..whereas if you had a variety of messages,

you could potentially choose the greeting

that you felt was appropriate for that relationship.

It's a little bit like a Christmas card.

I think I prefer these messages.

They're a little bit more sort of heart and soul, aren't they?

There was another Christmas essential many families bought

ready-made in late Victorian times,

one that used the baker's staple product as a key ingredient.

For the first time this Christmas, I've got some bread in my hand.

Not that I'm eating it - we're putting it in a pudding.

In earlier times, the word "plum" could refer to any dried fruit,

which is why this dish had long been known as plum pudding.

As with mincemeat, suet is crucial, plus booze,

in this case, rum and maraschino.

Putting the Christmas into the pudding.

It was the Victorians who rebranded the centuries-old recipe

-as Christmas pudding.

-It smells amazing.

It had once been eaten throughout the winter,

but it began to be seen as something

which was only appropriate on December the 25th,

fixed there in the public imagination

partly by its frequent appearances on newfangled Christmas cards.

Some customers - and canines, apparently -

demanded round puddings.

To attain the perfect sphere, bakers might use a pudding basin.

Or, more traditionally,

the cloth-wrapped mix would simply be hand moulded.

That's one mighty pudding, that, isn't it?

It looks a bit like a little bomb, but it looks very good.

Well, that's right. They said cannonballs.

Awesome.

Other Victorian customers demanded fancier forms.

This is the shape Mrs Beeton calls for

in her best-selling Book Of Household Management.

To get a perfect pudding out of a mould like this

will be a challenge.

It depends on both careful preparation

and the right consistency of mix.

If you get this wrong, it's a disaster.

Yeah, it'll be my fault if it does.

-Yeah, your fault, John!

-I've got confidence.

This is proper Victorian bling, this is.

It's a beautiful shape, isn't it?

-I can't wait to turn this pudding out and see what it's like.

-I know.

The puddings need to be boiled, not steamed, for several hours.

Once cooled, they will be sold to customers to reheat at home

on the big day.

Right, we need some good string.

For their own Christmas lunch, the bakers are preparing turkey,

a choice which became more popular

towards the end of the Victorian era.

-I mean, this will make the fat nice and crispy, this.

-Oh!

But it wouldn't have been alone in their oven.

Bakeries threw open their doors on Christmas Day

for customers to bring along their meals for roasting too.

That's because many people were too poor to have an oven at home,

while others simply didn't have one big enough.

So these are the meats that the local community

would have brought to be baked in your ovens.

Turkey is not the only meat that people like to sit down to.

Beef is very traditional.

Goose is quite cheap.

Your ovens, they'll be well stocked.

Well, this is really a custom

that has only died out in the last few decades, really.

I mean, I remember it.

Yeah, I remember it well from when I was a kid.

All the villagers would bring their turkeys

for my father to cook in the ovens

and beef joints would come and we'd put them in the oven.

Then all the blokes would sit around drinking lots of beer

while the turkeys cooked.

It's the community coming together and all of us helping each other

to have a very special day.

Sounds like a grand thing to do.

I'll start it again, then.

I quite fancy taking my Christmas joint down to the baker's.

"Excuse me, could you put this in your oven?"

Yeah, with everybody else and having a nice party

for the few hours that it cooked. Great stuff.

-Reinstating that sense of Victorian community in local areas.

-Yeah.

The bakers are celebrating their last Christmas

in a more middle-class setting than before

because the status of their profession

had improved by the end of Victoria's reign.

The gingerbread decorations find their home.

Stick him in right in the middle.

They look good, don't they?

Oh!

Don't break them now we've gone to so much trouble to make them.

THEY LAUGH

Crackers were also often hung on the tree.

They're another new Victorian Christmas tradition -

the invention of confectioner Tom Smith.

At his London shop in the 1850s,

the former baker's assistant started wrapping bonbons in tissue paper.

When he threw in a motto and added a snap,

he created a vast business empire.

It does really show the entrepreneurial kind of spirit,

because it's not like these guys and girls didn't have enough

on their plate, enough to do as it is.

Yet they're going and diversifying any way to make a few extra quid.

And not only diversifying,

but creating something that is... it signifies Christmas for us.

-It's still on our tables every year.

-Yeah, it's still around today.

And another Christmas favourite finally turned up

in the late 19th century.

Ho-ho-ho, Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everybody!

We'd had a British version of Father Christmas for centuries,

but he didn't give out gifts.

He didn't look like we'd expect today, either.

Sometimes he'd be portrayed as a thin figure dressed in green.

But later Victorians imported a new look from the United States

where he was now called Santa Claus,

their pronunciation of the continental St Nicholas.

American artists began to depict Santa as plus-sized

and dressed in red. Contrary to popular myth,

this was decades before a certain cola drink was even invented.

Have you been a good boy, Duncan?

Britons used to exchange presents at the start of the New Year.

But later, in the 19th century, we again copied the Americans,

and also the Germans, by making the custom part of our new,

super-sized Christmas Day.

Oh, presents for everybody!

Mrs Beeton declared that a Christmas dinner

with the middle classes of this empire would scarcely be

a Christmas dinner without a portly pater familias

carving his own fat turkey.

Oh, look at that. Oh.

That is...

That is nice. Thank you very much.

-I love bread sauce.

-Yeah.

-It's great to...

It's the best part of the meal.

The bread is only really featured as part of a bread sauce...

-Or stuffing...

-..crumbed into the puddings.

-Yeah.

But it's still a nice little reminder that...

-The baker's important.

-Yeah, exactly.

The baker can make Christmas.

I actually really enjoyed this,

because it's finally been a chance for you to see

a time when cake-makers take the lead.

Cakes should come first at certain times of the year.

Yeah, it's all part of the baking industry, isn't it?

Be it bread, be it cakes, be it mince pies,

if it's a product that needs baking, we can do it.

This is the very picture of a middle-class,

late Victorian Christmas, isn't it?

Yes, I mean, this is the rise of the respectable society

at Christmas time.

Yeah, I mean, the Victorians almost gave Christmas rules.

There were certain things that people had to do,

so, you can't imagine a table, either then or indeed now,

without the crackers, without the cards, without the tree.

It's almost like we have a set pattern that we have to fit

which certainly wasn't the case in the early Victorian period.

The Victorians are the ones that shaped Christmas to what it is now.

You have Santa Claus, you have the Christmas tree,

you've got the gifts.

And what has really surprised me is that all of those changes came in

in such a short period of time.

We think of the traditional Christmas and, of course,

those traditions were not traditions.

Every tradition, somebody had to invent it.

Through the Victorian era, more things have been introduced

and it feels to me like Christmas is being commercialised.

As a baker, it seems like they made a big opportunity

of making profit out of Christmas.

So much of what's here relies upon the baker.

From the cake, which would've been bought,

to the turkey that's been put into the baker's oven.

It's fascinating to see how you can journey throughout

a whole period of 70 years.

But these people, this idea of baking, is still so crucial

to our idea of a proper traditional British Christmas.

# Now bring us a figgy pudding

# Now bring us a figgy pudding... #

-Wahey!

-Hello.

Oh, that's a nice colour. Look at that.

That looks rich, look at it.

-Wow. Look at that.

-That looks fantastic.

Let's take this off.

It's the first time any of the bakers have attempted

to make Christmas pudding in a mould like this

so they're not sure if it's going to come out in one piece.

-Did you feel it drop?

-Yeah, I did, actually.

All right, here we go.

Here goes.

Merry Christmas.

Oh, no!

THEY LAUGH

Gutted!

Oh, that's such a shame!

But look, yeah, look at the detail.

-And it's... Actually...

-If we'd known what we were doing...

LAUGHTER

It's not going to take away from the enjoying, you know,

the eating pleasure of it.

Yeah. Have we got some brandy?

Right. Let's do this.

Oh! Wow!

-Beautiful.

-Doesn't that look wonderful?

It does, doesn't it?

This is fantastic.

Isn't it good, yeah?

It's all the rich things in one bundle.

It's such indulgence.

Has everyone forgotten about the suet?

Yeah, I'm just trying not to think about it.

It does add flavour, it must do, because it's a really nice pudding.

When we make Christmas puddings,

we age them for months to get the richness coming through.

-And this...

-This, you don't have to.

-No.

This is the richest pudding I've ever tasted,

to say that it was only made just a few hours ago.

Wonderful.

I'm going in for more!

I tucked into an awful lot of that, I have to say.

And I shall be using the recipe to make it for myself.

I thought that Victorian Christmas would be very reverent

and religious and I've discovered most of the people having drink,

being merry and it was actually just the same as today.

I'd happily celebrate a Christmas like that over and over,

because we had a lot of fun.

It's been great to get together,

and it's so interesting to go back in time

and to understand where the traditions came from.

'Christmas, at the end of Victoria's reign, is just so idyllic.

'It's just beautiful.'

And I've just lived it. It's amazing.

-We should raise a toast.

-To bakers and confectioners everywhere.

-In every age.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

-Happy Christmas.

-Happy Christmas.

-Happy Christmas.