IT'S GETTING TO FEEL A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS

PUDDING OR PAVLOVA? TIME TO CHOOSE.

A few years ago, Australian friends came to stay over Christmas.

 “If you were at home now,” I asked, “what would you be having for lunch?”

“Well, since it’s high summer out there...” said the husband.

“....and the temperature’s at least 90 degrees Fahrenheit....” added his wife.

“...with bushfires everywhere....”

“...we’d probably go for something cold....”

“...some nice prawns...maybe a lobster....”

“…with a green salad…”

“And for dessert?”

They stared at me. Silly question. “A Pavlova, naturally.”

Christmas dinner with seafood and a meringue shell filled with fruit and cream is something new. In  my  childhood, an extended and indigestible English-style Christmas lunch was obligatory, a legacy from earlier generations, who regarded themselves as transplanted Britons and still spoke nostalgically of England as “Home”, even though they’d never been there.  

Driven by the same impulse, we ignored the fact that almost every tree on the continent was a eucalypt, and raked up a scraggy conifer on which to hang our hoarded decorations. For the twelve days of Christmas, this reminder of the European winter drooped in a corner of the living room, shedding needles onto the carpet. Festoons of tinsel yellowed in the heat while strings of fairy lights glimmered in despair at the sunlight that blasted through even the thickest curtains.

If we hesitated  in our celebration of a feast whose roots lay in the ritual sacrifices of neolithic Scandinavia, commerce stood ready to spur us on. By October, cardboard Santas and boxes of Christmas crackers were appearing in the newsagents. Butchers urged us to order our turkeys and hams.  And at the height of the Australian spring,  some seasonal impulse  nudged my mother into creating her puddings.

Their firm, slightly gelatinous consistency, more like heavy aspic than cake, and achieved, I later learned, by substituting white breadcrumbs for some of the flour, made them delicious both hot and cold. The two or three she made never lasted through the holidays. Descending in the dawn of Boxing Day, hoping for a few quiet, cool hours before the heat descended and the flies rose,  one would surprise a family member standing in robe and slippers before the open refrigerator, furtively forking up the last crumbs of a plateful.

It took her days to assemble, weigh and amalgamate the fats and carbohydrates, dried and preserved fruits and rinds, the liqueurs and spices that went into these potent examples of traditional northern European Christmas cuisine. I can still feel the gluey yellow/brown batter between my fingers, gritty with sugar but at the same time slick with butter.

Once the mix was completed,  she exhumed from a bottom drawer half a dozen “pudding cloths.” Squares cut from the remains of ancient linen tea-towels, they were stiff as parchment, “seasoned” with repeated use.  Each one, freshly scattered with flour, was allocated a share of the paste, into which, before being gathered into a bundle with a loop of string, a sixpenny piece, boiled free of germs, was dropped, a good luck charm to the person who got that particular slice.

Attached by their strings, the puddings were suspended in boiling water from a broom handle placed across the largest pot we owned. After simmering them for hours, she lifted them out and hung them to “season” from the shower rail in the bathroom. They remained there until Christmas day, when the cloth was  peeled off, and the pudding carried ritually to the table,  doused in burning brandy, the blue flames dancing feebly in the summer light. 

During the 1970s, living in England, I succumbed at last, and decided to make my own. Extracting the recipe from my mother, I corraled the ingredients – far easier in London, I thought smugly,  than in Australia – and boiled up a single example which I hung behind the shower curtain in my miniscule bathroom. Returning from a trip a few days before Christmas, I checked – to find it invaded by blue-grey mould. Dumping the musty failure in the garbage, I bought a ready-made one at Harrod’s.

           This year, however, we have hopes of the tradition being revived. Our daughter Louise, on a recent spell in Australia, persuaded my sister to divulge the family recipe, and has prepared one for Christmas lunch. It is even now maturing – hopefully free of mould – and will be ready to be devoured on Christmas day. In one feature, unfortunately, the new pudding will be disadvantaged. No amount of searching could turn up even one silver sixpenny piece,  and Euros just aren’t the same.