The taste of the pudding is in the reading. With Christmas just around the corner, I have been getting some second-hand pleasure by going through food books and recipes devoted to Christmas with Nigella Lawson’s gorgeous book by my bedside.
I am not into baking puddings and cakes, but it’s always fun reading about them. I like the thought of the ingredients that go into them — butter, cream, chocolate, and some good old brandy or rum. Lawson adds bourbon to her traditional Christmas cake, but says that brandy or sherry would also do.
“Baking a Christmas cake or a batch of mince pies, mixing up muffins or a meltingly mouth-watering chocolate cake may not carry any moral weight, and it is not going to win you the Nobel Prize, but it makes you, and those around you, feel blissfully immersed in the sort of Christmas we’d like to believe in, all log fires, hushed snowfall and harmony,” she writes in Nigella Christmas .
For many of us, Christmas is all about food. From childhood reading about roast turkey stuffed with herbs or a Christmas pudding dotted with raisins, the festival has been synonymous with food, glorious food. We had read about a turkey even before we had seen one. And I imagine for today’s youth (and quite a few grown-ups I know), Christmas comes alive in Harry Potter.
“Harry had never in all his life had such a Christmas dinner. A hundred fat, roast turkeys; mountains of roast and boiled potatoes; platters of chipolatas; tureens of buttered peas, silver boats of thick, rich gravy and cranberry sauce — and tacks of wizard crackers every few feet along the table,” J.K. Rowling writes. But while the young wizard may like his turkey, I find that serious foodies have nothing but disdain for the bird.
Roald Dahl has strong views about the poor turkey. Christmas, he writes in Roald Dahl’s Cookbook , was always about a goose, or a plump capon.
“…but some time ago someone decided that turkey was the thing to serve for Christmas dinner… And soon, virtually every family in Britain was stuffing itself at Christmas on one of the most tasteless meats that it is possible to find. I don’t know quite what is drier and more flavourless than a roast turkey. Its only virtue seems to be that one bird goes a long way,” Dahl writes.
A dog-eared copy of A Christmas Carol by Dickens opens up a delicious segment about a Christmas meal and the goose that has been cooked with sage and onion. Mrs. Cratchit has made the gravy and it’s hissing hot. Peter has mashed the potatoes. Belinda is ready with the apple-sauce. And the table waits for the goose to arrive.
India has its own Christmas food. A chef friend in Kolkata loves to cook pork and fish for Christmas. The Suriani Kitchen by Lathika George mentions a roast pork that is specially cooked for weddings and Christmas, with pork loin, pork fat, onions, garlic, red chillies, mustard and fenugreek seeds, vinegar, chopped ginger, black peppercorn, cloves, cardamom and cinnamon.
I am reminded of Dahl again. Let’s mark the day with his poem ‘Mother Christmas’.
Where art thou, Mother Christmas?
I only wish I knew
Why Father should get all the praise
And no one mentions you.
I’ll bet you buy the presents
And wrap them large and small
While all the time that rotten swine
Pretends he’s done it all.
So Hail To Mother Christmas
Who shoulders all the work!
And down with Father Christmas,
That unmitigated jerk!
The writer, who grew up on ghee-doused urad dal and roti, now likes reading and writing about food as much as he enjoys cooking and eating. Well, almost.
