Clootie Dumpling: The Pudding Boiled in a Cloth

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Clootie dumplings belong to home cooking, so their history is recorded mainly in later recipe books and recollections. Meanings attached to particular hidden charms vary. The earliest substantial printed account used here is that of the folklorist F. Marian McNeill, whose The Scots Kitchen (1929; revised 1963) records the dumpling as cottage food and gives a recipe; her description of it is treated as good evidence for her own time. Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, ed. Tom Jaine, 2014) has an entry on the clootie dumpling signed by Catherine Brown, the leading modern historian of Scottish cookery, and entries on pudding and Christmas pudding (the latter by Ralph Hancock) that set it in a wider British history. Brown's account of the charms and their meanings describes 20th-century custom; it does not date the practice.

Making a clootie dumpling

established The ingredients, flour, breadcrumbs or oatmeal, suet, sugar, dried fruit such as raisins and sultanas, spices such as cinnamon and ginger, treacle and milk, are mixed into a stiff batter. A cloth is scalded, dusted with flour and the mixture placed in the centre, then tied loosely to allow for expansion. The dumpling is boiled in a large pot of water for three to four hours.

established McNeill's version, spelled "Cloutie Dumpling", is plainer and older in character. It uses oatmeal and flour in equal parts (or either alone), shredded suet, sugar, sultanas or currants and cinnamon or mixed spice, mixed to a thick soft batter with buttermilk or thick sour milk and raised with bicarbonate of soda. There is no treacle or breadcrumb in her recipe. She gives two practical tips that cooks still use: hold the floured cloth inside a bowl while filling it, so the pudding comes out round, and stand it on an old plate in the bottom of the pot so it does not catch. It simmers for about two and a half hours, topped up with boiling water.

established The oatmeal and buttermilk point to the ordinary Scottish kitchen, where both were always to hand and the three-legged pot or "goblet" hung over the fire. McNeill also notes that a similar mixture was stuffed into tripe skins to make "sweet puddings", like sweet versions of the white or mealie pudding.

established Catherine Brown's modern description in The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) shows how the recipe has filled out. Her standard ingredients are flour, breadcrumbs, suet, dried fruit, eggs, treacle, spices, sugar and milk, with a raising agent and often some apple or carrot. A whole dumpling is a round, flattened ball weighing anything from about 115 g to 900 g (4 oz to 2 lb), and bakers often sell it in slices. Compared with a rich fruit cake or an English Christmas pudding, she notes, the mixture is much plainer. She suggests serving it with cream.

established A recipe from between those two shows the dumpling in transition. The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), gives a clootie dumpling made with 6 oz of margarine rubbed into 12 oz of flour, 6 oz of sugar, half a pound each of sultanas and currants, baking soda, cinnamon and ginger, bound with a tablespoon each of treacle and golden syrup, two beaten eggs and a little milk. The cloth is dipped in boiling water and floured, and the pudding is boiled for three hours and served with custard. There is no suet, oatmeal or breadcrumb, and no drying before the fire. Set beside McNeill's oatmeal-and-buttermilk version of 1929 and Brown's suet-and-breadcrumb one, it shows how freely the recipe has varied: the constants are the cloth, the spice, the dried fruit and the long boil.

The name

established "Cloot" or "clout" is Scots for a piece of cloth, the same word as English "clout". McNeill says simply that the dumpling is "so called because it is boiled in a clout or cloth". The Devil's Scots nickname "Clootie", which Burns uses, is a different word, from "cloot", a cloven hoof.

Plum porridge and plum pudding

shared The clootie dumpling belongs to the wider family of boiled fruit puddings. McNeill traces the Christmas plum pudding to "plum porridge", a spiced broth of beef, raisins, currants and prunes that Meg Dods (1826) already called "nearly obsolete". She quotes Robert Chambers's view that the first recipe for plum pudding "at least under that name" appeared in a Scottish cookery book, and points to Lady Grisell Baillie's Christmas menu of 1715 with both pottage and pudding. Her suggestion that plum porridge "solidified" into pudding by accident is her own speculation. Food historians generally see the pudding cloth, which became common in seventeenth-century England, as the decisive invention.

established The Oxford Companion to Food sets out that history. Its entry on Christmas pudding, by Ralph Hancock, traces plum puddings to the early 15th century. The first form, plum pottage, was a fairly liquid dish of chopped beef or mutton, onions, dried fruit and breadcrumbs, flavoured with wine and spices, and it came before the pudding cloth made large puddings possible. "Plum" first meant a prune but soon meant any dried fruit. Over the 16th century the meat was dropped and replaced by suet, which is the last trace of it, and the root vegetables survive in the token carrot of many recipes. Hancock also notes that the plain end of the family, plum duff, a suet pudding with less fruit, stayed popular for centuries. The clootie dumpling belongs to this plain end.

established The Companion's entry on pudding explains why the cloth mattered. Puddings began as sausages: the word probably descends from Latin botellus, sausage, by way of French boudin. Medieval white puddings of suet and breadcrumbs, some of them sweet, were cooked in sausage skins or in a stomach, like a haggis. The pudding cloth, which came into use around the beginning of the 17th century, freed puddings from animal guts. The Companion quotes C. Anne Wilson, who cites a recipe of 1617 for a sweet suet pudding boiled "tied in a fair cloth", and comments that after this puddings could be made at any time and became daily fare for almost all classes.

shared Catherine Brown makes the link to Scotland explicit. She calls the clootie dumpling the sweet version of haggis, the savoury pudding boiled in a sheep's or pig's stomach, made in a linen cloth instead. The comparison fits the Companion's general history, and McNeill's sweet puddings in tripe skins show the older, gut-cased form surviving alongside the cloth one in Scotland.

The skin

established When the dumpling is lifted out and the cloth peeled away, it is traditionally dried in front of the fire, or today in a warm oven, so that a shiny, firm skin forms. The skin is considered one of the best parts.

established Neither McNeill nor Annette Hope (1987) mentions drying: McNeill has the dumpling turned out carefully on to a hot ashet (serving dish), dredged with caster sugar and served with custard sauce, and Hope simply says to serve it with custard. The drying step may be a regional or later habit, or one she simply took for granted.

A celebration pudding

established Clootie dumplings were made for birthdays, Hogmanay and other celebrations. Coins wrapped in paper, or small charms, were often hidden inside, and finding one was thought lucky. In homes where most cooking was done over an open fire, boiling a pudding was easier than baking.

shared Hiding tokens in festive food is old in Scotland: McNeill records a ring in the Harvest Home meal-and-ale, charms in the Hallowe'en cake and a bean in the Twelfth Night cake. She does not, however, connect charms with the clootie dumpling, which she presents as an everyday cottage pudding. Its role as the birthday "cake" of families without ovens, with silver threepenny bits inside, is well remembered from the twentieth century but is hard to date earlier.

shared Catherine Brown's Companion entry gives the fullest account of the custom. The dumpling, she writes, was made originally as the Scottish alternative to a celebration fruit cake, for holidays, birthdays and the midwinter festivities known in Scotland as the Daft Days. It was easy to make where there was no oven and all cooking was done in a large pot over the fire. These special-occasion dumplings usually held a selection of "surprises", each with a meaning: a ring for marriage, a coin for wealth, a button for bachelordom, a thimble for spinsterhood, a wishbone for the heart's desire and a horseshoe for good luck. Brown does not say how old the dumpling custom is. Her word "originally" is a judgement, since the earlier printed record, McNeill's included, describes the dumpling as everyday cottage food.

established The Daft Days were the holiday season from Christmas to New Year and Handsel Monday, the old Scottish midwinter break that the poet Robert Fergusson celebrated in "The Daft-Days" (1772). The Companion's entry on Hogmanay notes that the Church banned the observance of Christmas in Scotland in 1649, so the New Year holiday came to do duty for Christmas, Yule and Twelfth Night, which helps explain why a festive pudding in Scotland belongs to Hogmanay and birthdays more than to Christmas Day.

Leftovers

established Leftover dumpling is often sliced and fried in butter or bacon fat and served as part of a cooked breakfast. Catherine Brown notes in the Companion that cold dumpling is often fried with bacon and eggs.

Other Scottish dumplings

established The clootie dumpling is the best known of Scotland's sweet dumplings, Brown notes, but not the only one. The Companion's entry on dumplings records a savoury relation: a green suet dumpling once made in Scotland in spring with dandelion and nettle leaves, hawthorn buds and whatever else came to hand.

• "Cloot" is Scots for cloth.
• A clootie dumpling boils for several hours.
• Its skin is formed by drying it after boiling.
• Coins were often hidden inside.
• Leftovers are fried for breakfast.
• McNeill's recipe was raised with buttermilk and bicarbonate of soda, like a soda scone.
• An old plate in the bottom of the pot stops the dumpling sticking and scorching.
• The Devil's nickname "Auld Clootie" has nothing to do with cloths: it means "cloven-hoofed".
• In the old charm code, finding the button meant bachelordom and the thimble spinsterhood.
• The word "pudding" probably goes back to a Latin word for sausage.

• Myth: The boiled cloth pudding is uniquely Scottish. Boiling puddings in cloths was common across Britain, and the pudding cloth came into use in England around the beginning of the seventeenth century.
• Disputed: How plum pudding began. McNeill suggests that plum porridge "solidified" into pudding by accident, but that is her own speculation. Food historians generally see the pudding cloth as the decisive invention.
• Myth: "Clootie" in the dumpling is the same word as the Devil's nickname "Auld Clootie". The dumpling's "cloot" is cloth. The Devil's nickname comes from a different "cloot", a cloven hoof.
• Myth: The hidden charms and their meanings are an ancient custom. They are recorded from twentieth-century practice. McNeill does not connect charms with the dumpling, and Catherine Brown does not say how old the custom is.