Christmas in the Cold
Long before food became my vocation, I spent a Christmas season in northern England. The three months that preceded that cold, wet December had left me mostly unimpressed with English food. But then again, I was a graduate student living in a dorm with hallmates who had a penchant for beans on toast! Years later, the meals I remember most from my stay in Lancashire include the cozy pub lunches of cheese, “pickle,” and cress, known as the Ploughman’s lunch; the platters of smoked Scottish salmon, dense hearth bread and graceful flutes of French champagne set out on weekends at the historical farmhouse home of my British Rotary scholar “sponsors,” and of course, those incendiary stews riddled with curry shared with friends at otherwise forgettable Indian restaurants.
As Christmas approached that year, I found myself longing for the tastes (and climate) of home. I doubted that my friends’ love for traditional Christmas pudding, something that sounded suspiciously similar to pariah fruitcake to me, could be a shared affection. But it turns out that their dark, dense cake aflame with brandy and served with an even more decadent brandy butter, sits right up there with my other favorite English food memories. And believe me, I hate fruitcake.
Christmas pudding, I’ve since learned, is a hand-me-down version of the fat mince pie once served with great ceremony at British holiday meals. The mince pie, especially popular in the Middle Ages, was plumped full of meat, including pheasant and rabbit, and made heartier with the addition of breadcrumbs, almonds, dried fruit, and assertive mulling spices. By the mid-19th century, the pudding had evolved into an essentially sweet offering, with beef suet its sole remaining meat ingredient.
The Christmas puddings I sampled in Lancashire were rich, sticky affairs that, when homemade, took a couple of days to complete. Most were filled with raisins and currants, almonds, bits of soft apple, and candied citrus peel. Part cake, part pudding in texture, this Christmas specialty was made desirably softer when dosed with brandy and flambéed, to the general hooting and hollering of the dinner guests gathered around the table. Not unlike mashed potatoes, the pudding’s soft, mushy texture is part of its universal appeal.
As I recall from the homey Christmas dinner my hallmates and I managed to create inside the gloomy kitchen of our Grizedale College dorm, spoonful upon spoonful of brandy-soaked pudding was doled out while we pulled our Christmas crackers — gift-filled tubes wrapped in decorative foil and twisted on the ends like hard candy. We laughed over the ridiculous riddles included inside the crackers and spooned up more “pud,” reaching across the table to scrape up the bottom of the pan and bumping our party-hat covered heads. The brandy hard sauce went next, that irresistible bowl of pure butter swirled with liqueur.
In retrospect, Christmas pudding, at least as I remember it from that cold Christmas in Lancaster, was as much about the brandy as the pudding’s fruit- and nut-filled center. The pudding was rich, the alcohol warming, and I rose from the table sated — happily flushed with the joy of my first English Christmas.
This article appears in December 21 • 2001.