Autumn is a time of the year when many people’s culinary thoughts focus on pumpkins and bonfire toffee, but, however irritating premature appearances of Christmas trees in the shops may be, there is no doubt the festive season is looming.

This means those hosting on Christmas Day will soon have to plan the culinary aspect, which is not just about the turkey.

Yes, you can buy a Christmas pudding in the shops, but some may want to make one themselves. That means knowing just what sort of bulk dried fruit you need to get to make the nation’s stodgy festive favourite.

The good news is there are plenty of experts out there with their recipes. For example, Bake Off presenter Mary Berry has published a recipe which will contain 450g (1 lb) of dried fruit for a pudding to serve 6-8 people. 

This would include sultanas, raisins, and snipped apricots. That won’t be the only fruit in the pud, however, with grated orange rind, a small cooking apple and 40g of almonds also included.

If you prefer Nigella Lawson to Mary Berry as your favourite celebrity cook, trying to recreate Nigella’s Ultimate Christmas Pudding may be your goal.  

This treat includes 150g of currants, as well as the same weights of sultanas and chopped prunes. This recipe also includes a small cooking apple, but no orange or almonds.

As can be seen, even the top bakers have different fruit recommendations and indeed a reader query about the fruit content of Nigella’s pudding regarding currants brought the response that, yes, the fruit can be varied for taste to “a certain extent”, though not too much.

In this case, it was explained the suggestion of using dates instead of currants was likely to be problematic as they would be a bit hard and not soak up much of the sherry. Chopped figs or apricots would be a better alternative.

The key point was: “You mainly need to make sure that you keep the total quantity of fruit the same and also use dried fruits that have a fairly soft texture,” which goes to show that you can pick different pudding recipes, but you will always need plenty of fruit.