Sweet treat for Christmas table
Mentioned in Despatches:
Advent Sketches
Christmas is Pudding:
Early in December, the small mother would haul out the heirloom pottery mixing basin, and the next several days would be spent in the sacred rituals associated with preparing the most deliciously versatile pudding ever made. They included The Grating of the Traditional Suet, that delicious shortener, now rarely used, which gave the puddings (we always made them in batches of six) a chewy texture even butter could never replace.
A pox on diet police who persuaded anyone to avoid such a pleasure! Where else do you find a pudding which can be filled with silver coins and eaten hot, (at least three helpings, accompanied by the ambrosiac experience of various sauces,) on a sweltering Christmas Day?
On Boxing Day, my wife’s hedonistically mouthwatering habit, (no nun intended) of frying slices of yesterday’s pudding in butter, sprinkling them with a little sugar, and serving them with the thick yellow cream which came from New Zealand’s Jersey herds.
It was a gourmet combination instrumental in reducing those feelings of day-after-Christmas heaviness. Later, because these puddings were immune to decay, slices accompanied picnics, and, Hoorah!, lunches to school during the heat of February.
They went with my schoolteacher father earning a little extra tossing hay bales on local farms, or on streamside breaks stalking wily brown trout in the crystal pools of Hawke’s Bay or Ruapehu streams. These puddings, hanging in their cloths like epicurean cannon balls, in ‘‘a cool place’’, were immortal, boiled to revival in midwinter to be served with a midwinter’s version of Christmas Past, and offered in lunches as an epicurean promise of Christmas to come.
Never Too Early:
But you can be too late if you do not look ahead. Last week Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival directors Bronwyn Bent and Sally Barnett released their programme for February 20 to March 3 2018.
At festivals one has feasts, and this festival offers an epicurean excitement, a gourmet range of courses to match any Christmas dinner. Laughter, drama, foot tapping music and its sentimental partner moody blues, as well as operatic and orchestral gigs, rib tickling coarse comedy and slapstick delights, theatre in variety, including the now embedded Shakespeare experience, (this year ‘‘Pericles’’) at 4 am. Include great wine, and food, and beer for the blokes and birds as a bonus.
With lotsa people you saw last year, and too few seats for some shows, get a programme by going to the Gardens - well worth a look at this time of year, to Creative