The happiness of Christmas Pudding

...and memories of an upside-down Christmas

Addendum: Prepare ahead - there’s just enough time to give your pudding a few days rest to mature. Reheat by the same method for two hours on the day. Tip out the pudding and bury little tokens wrapped in foil in it (a button for a year of batchelorhood, a silver coin for riches, a thimble for a spinster, a ring for a wedding). Flame with warm brandy and serve with brandy butter aka Hard Sauce: softened butter beaten up with twice its own weight of sieved icing (powdered) sugar and as much brandy (or whisky or rum) as the mixture will accept without splitting. For children and non-drinkers, replace the hard stuff with orange juice and a scraping of zest. Slice the leftovers and crisp in a hot pan in butter, which is by the far the most delicious way to eat it and the best reason to make it in the first place.

The very first Christmas I remember (as happens at this time of year) was of fireflies in mimosa trees, fishing with a bent pin from a harbour wall and building sandcastles on the beach. I was six and my brother seven when our mother, widowed after a brief wartime marriage, married an English diplomat on the Spanish circuit, who had just been posted to the British Embassy in Uruguay. Wishing to give her children and new husband a proper English Christmas, my mother, who had never set foot in a kitchen unless to discuss the day’s menu with the cook, ordered the entire feast to be shipped to Montevideo from Harrods care of the diplomatic bag.

Her shopping list included tinned Walls sausages and canned ready-cooked chestnuts, Christmas pudding in a bowl, brandy butter in a jar, glass baubles and tinsel for the tree. There were also cotton-wool snowballs and crackers packed in a box labelled ‘contains explosives’. Uruguay’s customs officer, with admirable efficiency, translated the label and alerted the police. The army was called in, confiscated the lot and transfered the entired contents of the diplomatic bag to a small island off the coast, added dynamite and a long fuse, informed the locals so they could watch from the beach, and triggered a huge explosion of tinsel and pudding-bits visible from Punte del Este, where government and diplomats spent their Christmas holiday among the mimosa trees and fireflies.

The following year, Nanny and the children - my brother and me - were despatched by flying boat (there was such a thing) to Buenos Aires and onwards by steam-train (yes, really - we had to load up with water every hundred miles) to spend the Christmas holidays in Bariloche, a summer resort, now a fashionable ski-resort, in the Argentinian Andes. On arrival, Nanny, a flirtaceous redhead from Aberdeen, took up with a gang of gauchos and received an invitation (horse and ponies supplied) to a cattle-round-up at a nearby estancia for the traditional Christmas day asado. In this case, a whole young bullock spit-roasted over a driftwood fire beside Lake Nauel Huahapi. The water reflected the blueness of the sky and snow-capped mountain peaks whose slopes were covered in orange-petalled day-lilies.

Fortunately Nanny had brought along a billycan for tea-making and a supply of PG Tips necessary to preparation of a reliable Scottish cuppa. Meanwhile, a replacement Harrods pudding (sent over non-diplomatic mail) was set to warm in an earth-oven on a bed of embers. The gauchos drank mate, a magical infusion sucked from a hollowed-out gourd with a silver straw, while watching the main event turning on a spit (occasionally basted with salt and water from an empty whisky bottle) that had, just a few hours previously, accompanied us merrily on the hoof, a lesson in reality I never forgot.

p.s Happy Christmas to all my subscribers! Beloved paid sub-ers (don’t I just love you!) will shortly be in receipt of a recipe for old fashioned New England mincemeat pies.

p.p.s. …plenty more stories and recipes in My Life as a Wife.