By popular request

Christmas 2010

Revelers,

This is how Dickens describes the feast provided by the spirit of Christmas present:

Turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, suckling-pigs, long wreathes of sausages, mince pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelth-cakes and seething bowls of punch….

One cannot disassociate food and drink from the Christmas season. To my mind, any discussion of holiday fare must begin with steam pudding. Dad was the purveyor of this decidedly less-than-popular Christmas dessert. He admired all things British from tea time to Tolkien to the Repeal of the Corn Laws. The only two songs I remember him trying to sing/whistle/hum were British Grenadiers and English Country Garden. (A young Brit once sang me a parody of the latter that went something like: “What do you do/When you can't find the loo/in an English country garden?/Unzip your pants/And suffocate the ants/in an English country garden.) Steam pudding is unusual in many ways – its preparation, texture, smell, taste and presentation. It is, shall we say, an acquired taste. To try and generate some enthusiasm for the desert, Dad offered many versions over the years – figgy pudding, plum pudding, sterling pudding, finally breaking through to the indisposed with chocolate steam pudding. I gradually came around to the desert by suffocating it with its traditional accompaniment, hard sauce – butter and sugar and alcohol. Naturally, as a Dad myself lo these many years I have striven mightily each Christmastide to convince my children of the virtues of steam pudding. At least they love its pyrotechnic aspects. Anyway, as long as suet is available I'll continue to carry on a hallowed family tradition. (There are updated versions that substitute butter, but what's the point of steam pudding that doesn't feature a robust wad of beef fat?)

To counter Anglo influences, I have added “Bûche Noel” to our holiday fare the last few years. The extra challenge of preparing this dessert is that all the recipes I've found have been in French. This means calculating flour in grams, milk in liters, and preheating the oven in centigrade. It also means wading through paragraphs of verbiage as most French recipes include lengthy deconstructions. I'm also surprised how much French recipes use the subjunctive tense. The most authentic Bûche Noel recipe I have used called for preparing “crème au marrons,” which I first thought had something to do with blending idiots. But of course it was chestnuts I needed. A laborious preparation required the removal of the chestnut's hard skin through incisions, par-boiling, incantations and a veg-o-matic, or as the French say, veg-o-matique. The standard challenge of the Bûche Noel is baking and utilizing the “grénoise”—a thin spongy cake that's supposed to be easy to roll, unroll and re-roll. But it always cracks at some point so that the chocolate covered “Christmas log” winds up looking more like a cow pie. Anyway, it's a great recipe for facilitating the mastery of French swear words ("fils d'un biscuit!").

Eggnog certainly must be near the top of everyone's holiday beverage list. For years I thought eggnog was a trade name of Schneider's Dairy. Each December our milkman would pause long enough from pick-up basketball games with us in the driveway to stick a couple of quart containers of Schneider's eggnog in our refrigerator. And when Epiphany was over, we'd dump the contents down the drain. Even fresh grated nutmeg didn't help much. Homemade eggnog is another drink altogether. Our family was introduced to real eggnog by brother Bob who had a knack for discovering many good things ranging from Monty Python to Captain Beefheart to Rolfing. If he ever used a recipe, it is now unfortunately lost. Apparently, Bob's eggnog could only be made in huge quantities, which was just as well because it was so addictive. The taste was superb. The alcoholic blend perfect: Rum, bourbon and, as I recall, antifreeze. But it was its consistency that made Bob's creation distinctive. It was a sort of high-volume Elmer's glue; quite impossible to drink. My memories are of imbibers holding their cups upside down over their mouths and waiting…and waiting. Suddenly the gelatinous blob in the shape of a cup would drop into their twitching mouths – or the general vicinity. Bob later used his recipe to develop landscape formations integral to his game “Panama Rocks”. (See Christmas letter 2007)

Another intriguing seasonal drink is a smoking bishop. This was again one of Dad's British imports. The wonderful thing about a smoking bishop is that each drink is supposed to be heated in your glass by a hot poker. Our family tried this on numerous occasions. The poker was heated in our living room fireplace. This was an ordeal because we had to get a decent fire going. Thus, there were spider-filled logs to be carried in from the cold outside, flue adjustments to be made, bellows to be mended, furniture to be busted up for kindling, and back issues of the Fuddette* to be wadded up for ignition. Usually the logs refused to burn or else produced a thick layer of acrid smoke obligating us to crawl around on the floor in search of a strata of unpolluted air (contrary to accusations at the time, there was no connection between this behavior and alcoholic consumption). Often stubborn smoking logs were tossed out into the front lawn which generated phone calls from concerned neighbors. “Betty, is everything all right? We heard John cursing and now the front of your house seems to be on fire." (Neighbors harbored deep suspicions of our household due to the years of Halloween related hijinks and our liberal use of Vietnam War-era explosives – again, thanks Bob!) A major breakthrough in poker heating occurred when brother Steve miraculously procured a 19th century poker specifically designed for heating beverages. It was a handsomely crafted thing which we found worked most effectively when the beverage was first brought to a rolling boil on the stove.

One evening while preparing smoking bishops., Dad observed that an alternate name for the drink was an “irate prelate”. I can see him making this remark sitting there at the head of the dinner table, arms crossed, breathing audibly through his nose, his mouth clenched shut as he tried desperately to suppress a smile which seemed to escape anyway through his watering eyes. He just could not contain his mirth over witticisms like this. We left him there his nasal breathing growing louder, tears streaming down his face as the conversation moved on to whether biblical characters should be treated as nonfictional or fictional for the purposes of playing Botticelli.

I would be remiss in a holiday beverage discussion not to at least mention Olde Frothingslosh. The beer was a brilliant marketing ploy by the Pittsburgh Brewing Company to sell a truly sub-mediocre product. Their signature Iron City Beer could only be tolerated on very hot summer days while watching a pirate game when they had talent. The idea of Olde Frothingslosh originated with Pittsburgh radio nutball Rege Cordic in the 1950s. The Pittsburgh Brewing Company eventually cashed in on the idea and our family was suckered into buying a case or two down through the years. It was advertised as the "stale pale ale" that was so light the foam was on the bottom. I believe the cans glowed in the dark too.

So hoist a glass, unloosen your belt, and hide the fruitcake.


Merry Christmas,

Peter


*The Fuddette was a brilliant if short-lived literary effort by brother Steve. After being kicked off the junior high newspaper for refusing to reveal his sources for a scandalous story on bell schedules, Steve launched an underground school newspaper, the Fuddette. Steve was reporter, writer, editor, typesetter, printer, distributor and gopher. It was a true underground newspaper as Steve ran off copies in our basement using a little manual printing press we'd gotten one Christmas. Presaging the echo chamber media today, Steve composed all the letters to the editor.