Western Morning News (Saturday)
BOXING DAY FEAST WITH A DIFFERENCE
Martin Hesp says he’s going to break with tradition this year and have a Maldives feast
So what to do on a Boxing Day when the full festive blast of a traditional Christmas never really happened? In a normal year you might not have time to even read these words, because you’d be helping to clear up yesterday’s culinary deluge and starting a long day of preparing a new round of feasting.
But this Boxing Day, of all Boxing Days… How to get enthused? Where are we home-cooks going to find that magic element that causes us to rub our hands together with glee and say: “I know what! I feel inspired! We’ll have another fabulous repast with all the trimmings…”
At least there’s a good chance we’ve not over-done things in the past 24 hours. Most of us will have witnessed fairly minimal festivities compared to the normal excess. For some older readers it may even have resembled a Christmas from yesteryear.
I well remember the time we asked WMN readers to share their memories of Christmases back in the Good Old Days – and a lot of older folk wanted to remind the modern world that life was much tougher in times gone by. Almost all the letters and emails that landed on my desk declared how spoilt we are today, and how frugal and penny-pinching Christmas was before full-on consumerism created the modern orgy of giving, receiving, eating and drinking, over-stuffing and excess.
So I guess to some slight extent, many of us returned to the old fashioned kind of Christmas this year. We may have done ourselves proud as individuals or in small family groups, but I’m guessing that most festive feasts yesterday resembled something more like a normal Sunday roast than the entire December 25 shooting match with all the trimmings.
But if you were to compare the Good Old Days with the subdued Christmas of 2020, you’d conclude that at least they had each other back in the days before consumerism took over.
Mary Marsham of Taunton told the WMN: “After tea, Uncle Jack would play the piano for a sing-song, while the adults all had a jolly drink. The ladies drank something called Green Goddess cocktails, which I tasted once – it was horrible and gave me a headache. The men had whisky and they all sang Roll out the Barrel, Run Rabbit Run and It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow.
“Uncle Jack would hammer away at the piano then I’d be told to play my party-piece, which was Alice Blue Gown.”
“What I liked about Christmas in those days – around 1938 – was that everything was homemade,” wrote Mary. “From the presents Dad made out of wood, to the cakes and puddings – and, of course the entertainment. Nowadays, people just sit there and consume, except for the poor mums who have to cook...”
Here’s a memory from reader Eric Johns who emailed: “In the days of cast-iron cooking ranges, an essential Christmas chore involved rubbing all the metal with black-lead and polishing the steel brightwork, such as stove knobs, handles and trims, until they shone like silver.
“I still have a small leather pad covered with ancient chain-mail which was used for this purpose,” wrote Eric. “Finally, mother would make sure the oven was spotless and then entirely whitewash the interior before stoking the fire and putting in the goose to cook.”
Bob James of St Austell was properly downbeat: “Having opened your few presents you shrugged off your disappointments and just got on with it. There wasn’t much in the way of lunch to look forward to. No turkey in those days – not even a chicken. To all intents and purposes, Christmas was an anticlimactic day. You just played with whatever present you’d got – maybe a wooden hoop – hoped it would snow, and looked forward to Boxing Day when at least normality returned and you were allowed out to play with your mates again.”
And Joy Harris from Sidmouth wrote: “When it came to the food preparation, Christmas was enough to put me off cooking for life. Both my husband and I are of the same mind. We hate Christmas and leave for Tenerife every
December and don’t come back until January.”
The festive missives got worse... “Here’s my recipe for a form of terrorism,” emailed a cheerful reader who called himself Malcolm X the Xmas-Hater. “Bring together families who don’t like each other, and don’t see one another all year for good reason, add rocket-fuel in the form of gallons of booze and light the touch-paper. Stand back and watch as sniping turns to full blown warfare and old hatreds come out by the dozen. Christmas isn’t jolly – it is social suicide.”
These letters and emails were all sent in 15 years ago and I can only hope that Malcolm X the Xmas Hater is in a more jolly state
of mind now that’s he witnessed a Christmas in which all those loathing families were kept apart. For my own part, I’ve had the quietest festive feast in 64 years. Missing my London-based son and his partner along with all my Dutch friends was the downside – the upside was that because there were just four of us, we had goose for the first time and very good it was too. So how am I going to celebrate this low-key Boxing Day? Well, I’ll be turning to the most tropical and exotic cuisine I’ve ever encountered in an attempt to bring some light and sunshine into proceedings – the food served in the Maldives is very different from anything I’ve eaten before; it is amazingly delicious, terribly healthy and full of refreshing zing.
Sometimes called Dhivehi cuisine, the food is wonderfully healthy – I’ve never seen an overweight islander during the times I’ve been there – and one reason for this is that there’s very little oil involved. Take the ubiquitous spice-paste, for example. All over the neighbouring Indian sub-continent and in nearby South East Asia you will find people making spice-pastes with a core lubricant of oil or ghee, but in the Maldives they simply use water. Because the spices are so fresh and vibrant, you don’t miss the fat content at all.
I was introduced to Dhivehi cuisine by Felix Bamert, executive chef at the beautiful, paradise-like,
Mirihi Island Resort. “The locals eat very light food in these islands,” he told me. “They are all very slim. They eat fish, fish, fish, then coconut and rice. Then they eat a lot of small bites – like a form of tapas. The spice mix is very typical for the Maldives – you include roast rice and coconut and you get a smooth paste which is easily absorbed and also you get a full range of flavours. They cook without very much heat – everything is on low or medium heat – it’s not with a wok like Chinese or Thai style. It gives them much more time. Which is a bit like the Maldives itself – you have more time here. There’s no pressure.”
One dish I found amazing was the Maldivian chicken curry which Felix showed us. In just a tiny dash of oil he fried all the usual spring onions, ginger and spices and then added the chicken pieces which had been marinading overnight in tamarind paste. What surprised me was how, in a plain steel pan that had no non-stick coating, the contents began to catch and burn slightly. At which point I’d have either added more oil or some form of liquid, but Felix merely grinned and threw in a large handful of chopped tomatoes. “Don’t worry – they will prevent any more during,” he said, clamping a tight lid down onto the pan. I was dubious and had visions of bits of chicken flesh with one side badly burned and sticking to the bottom of a blackened pan. But after 15 minutes when we removed the lid, the surfaces of the pan were as clean as a whistle and the moist curry was perfectly cooked.
“No, it’s not really how a chef learns – more like how a Maldivian housewife would cook,” smiled Felix. “But I have to say sometimes these old ways are better. The tomato will clean up the pan bottom almost by magic and bring all the caramelised flavours into the curry, which otherwise would not be there for you to enjoy.”
So that’s what I’m having this Boxing Day. As far as I know, no goose has ever been cooked in the Indian Ocean archipelago, but we are having goose curry cooked Maldives style in the Hesp household. Alongside the red lentil curry (recipe above) it could well be the only dish of its kind being cooked in the UK today. So what? It’s good enough to even delight Malcolm X the Xmas Hater.