The Good Life
To complete the fantasy of being a farmer’s wife, it’s necessary to be a seasonal baker.
According to the Mail Online’s “etiquette expert” – a concept so risible, given the Daily Mail’s obsession with pictures of celebrity derrières, that you suspect it must be a joke – putting up your Christmas decorations before mid-December is utterly vulgar. To put the tree up in November marks one as horribly middle class and not “proper”. Tinsel is tacky, unless you can source some of the 17th-century stuff, which was, apparently, made of real silver. If you must have a fake tree, it must be green; a pink tree, say, is beyond the pale.
We leave our tree up all year long, which would presumably render us de trop in Mail circles. It is a fake tree, obviously, and we leave it up because we love it. It is a Yule tree, made by The Artist, and was one of the loveliest things we have ever been given for Christmas. We put the presents under it.
This year, I am hoping Miles the sheep farmer will give me my lamb, Elizabeth Jane. I have been waging a not-very-cunning campaign to convince Miles that she will never make the grade as a milking sheep; she has a third teat, for one thing, and so must be a witch sheep. For another, I am training her to be very badly behaved so that she will be a nuisance in the milking shed.
Should this campaign fail, I would settle for a donkey. I don’t know what donkeys are for, exactly. And I don’t know whether they get on with sheep. But I do know that great English playwright and diarist Alan Bennett once said that the great regret of his life is that he had never kept a donkey. And I am against the storing up of regrets.
My Christmas cakes are made and are safely stored, away from nosy chickens and sheep, in a cooler bag in a cupboard. My great-grandmother used to make her Christmas cakes in June. She never had thruppence ha’penny to rub together but she still made her famous Christmas cakes every year until, in her nineties, she went into a home.
Her cakes were famous because they were made with love and money she didn’t have. She must have put away a few pennies a week to have been able to make them.
From June until December, they were stored under her bed in an old oak chest with brass hinges.
They were beautiful cakes, studded with jewels of dried fruit and nuts: cherries, fat sultanas, sweet currants and plump almonds. The fruit was steeped in cheap sherry, which is the best sort of booze to soak Christmascake fruit in. She lined her tins in triple layers of saved brown paper. They never burnt. She’d have won any Bake Off for those cakes. They looked magnificent.
They were also inedible. To keep critters at bay, she stored the cakes with mothballs. You can imagine what they tasted like come December. Guess what? We loved them. Mothballs are an acquired taste, admittedly. But so is coriander, which would have been unpalatable to my great-nana.
I have never made Christmas cakes before – I am not all that keen on mothballs and all Christmas cakes have about them, to me, a faint whiff of Nana’s oak chest. But I figured that if I am going to continue with the fantasy that I am a farmer’s wife, I ought to make Christmas cakes.
Mine are from the New York Times recipe page, and are called Caribbean black cakes. They are loaded with molasses and dark muscovado sugar, zest of limes and Angostura and prunes and lashings of cherry brandy and black rum.
They look good. They smell like a pub after a boozy Christmas work do. They would have given my nana a conniption. We’d have had to bring her round with a good whiff of mothballs.
Mothballs are an acquired taste, admittedly. But so is coriander.