Babi - Christmas cake is a very rich fruit cake with raisins, currants, sultanas, candied peel, etc - there are various recipes. You are supposed to make it and the pudding on "stir up Saturday", which is the last Saturday in November; it takes hours to cook, then when it's cold you wrap it in layers of greaseproof paper and store it. Every week you "feed" it by pushing a thin skewer into it and pouring your liquor of choice - traditionally brandy, but whisky and sherry are also used - into the holes. The week before Christmas you "marzipan" the cake, ie cover it with almond paste, then on Christmas Eve you ice it with Royal (thick, roll out) icing and your decorations - you can of course get very smart ones, but we, along with many families, have old ones that have been in the box for years - we have penguins, a church with carol singers, a Father Christmas, etc. (We also used to have little yellow chicks for the Easter cake, but our cats decided to see to them). The cake lasts forever (especially as most people don't actually like it!). A similar cake (without the robins, obviously
is traditionally used for wedding cakes, christening cakes, etc. For weddings, you often cut it up into small slices after the ceremony and send it in special little boxes to people who couldn't attend.
Gammon ham is a joint of ham that can be smoked or unsmoked. You soak it overnight in water, then you boil it with an onion stuck with cloves for an hour. When it's cooled down you score the fat with a knife, rub it with a mixture of mustard and brown sugar, stick it with some more cloves, put it in a roasting tin with a bit of apple juice or cider and roast it for about 45 minutes. Then you can eat it hot or cold. My children love it with fried potatoes or bubble and squeak.
I think a pecan or pumpkin pie would go down much better with most of us, but we are stuck with the tradition of the dread Christams pudding, which has to be flamed in spirit of some kind as it comes to the table. You have it with brandy sauce or brandy butter - my husband always makes vast quantities of the latter (except he makes it with whisky). Delia Smith suggests slicing up left over pudding and frying it for breakfast - personally I can think of few things more horrible.
Our turkey is stuffed with sage and onion stuffing or a variation thereon - the supermarkets sell all sorts of different stuffings now. The health and safety mafia these days tell us not to stuff the bird but to cook the stuffing separately. I remember when I was a child once going for Christmas to an aunt's. She was not a great cook, and her sister had left her some notes on how to do the turkey. In capital letters she had written "STUFF IT BUM END" - which for me at age 7 or 8 seemed immensely naughty.
Is a yam a sweet potato? We would never have had them in my childhood, but I do remember going with my mother on occasion to Brixton, and area of inner London that in those days was almost exclusively West Indian (these days it is heavily gentrified and the property prices reflect that) - there was a huge street market there every day, and they sold sweet potatoes, plantains, etc - I found it fascinating. Nowadays we can buy sweet potatoes in the supermarket, and I really like them, but we would never serve them with Christmas dinner (why I am not sure, they are delicious).
As for our transport - well it is just typical of our rail companies, they are hopeless. I remember as a child seeing the Golden Arrow steam train from our back garden in south London, as it made its way to Dover, and some of you may have seen the wonderful old steam trains in the film of The Railway Children (no, I was not alive then! just an example!). I recently saw a very interesting programme about the hill railways of India, most of which were built by British engineers and are still going strong. Sadly, things have changed a lot since then in the UK, and our trains are notoriously late, overcrowded, expensive and often filthy. Our local buses have continued to run throughout this bad weather - some of them go right up to the north coast and the country towns in between, and they have managed, but the trains just don't seem to be able to cope.
Rosemary
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