Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.” From Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Delhi does a respectable job of setting the Christmas table. From Palco’s non-alcoholic mass-baked plum cakes to the Oberoi’s Christmas hampers, buffet lunches featuring goose, turkey and mince pies, to glazed hams that can be ordered by the kilo and the stollen available at the annual German Embassy bash, there’s plenty for all but the Scrooges among us.
Which doesn’t explain why Christmas plunges some of us into deep vats of nostalgia. The Goans are eloquent on the subject of Christmas cake made from jealously guarded recipes, stirred at home, poured into tins and taken down to the village bakery to be baked to a deep brown hue; and on the merits of using Goan sausages and Portuguese-style bacalhau to enhance the Christmas table. Fights may break out on the subject of whether or not to include the pig’s liver in the stuffing for roast suckling pig, and how many eggs (12? 18?) should go into a proper Christmas bebinca.
For the Syrian Christian community, many will observe Lent — a period of fasting and eating only vegetarian food — for twenty days before Christmas. The Syrian Christian duck roast, with pepper and vinegar standing in for orange sauce, is another Christmas essential, as important as the marvelously named ‘inri-appam’ is at Easter. (The inriappam is named for the Latin acronym INRI, which translates to Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.)
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My nostalgia, despite the number of years I’ve lived in Delhi, is always for a Calcutta Christmas. Perhaps it was the presence of both the Jewish and the Christian communities that made it so special; perhaps it was just Calcutta’s unrestrained appetite for all festivals, especially those that integrated the unbridled consumption of food into the rituals. Sausages and pork chops, often cooked in mustard oil and served with the very Bengali condiment kashundhi, would appear on the table alongside turkey; various clubs, from the Calcutta Club to the Tollygunge, competed in the inventiveness and variety of turkey and goose stuffings, with one especially cunning bawarchi managing to include ‘jalpai’ — the Bengali version of the olive — and crab-apples in his recipe. And post-Xmas, turkey jhal frezi made for a welcome and simple lunch, mopped up perhaps with plaited loaves of Jewish chollah bread.
On Park Street, the venerable Flury’s — now a tinsel version of its former self — pulled out all the stops with Christmas cakes, breads and mince pies, as did relative upstarts like Kathleen’s and Kookie Jar. But there were only two acceptable routes to your plum pudding, for traditionalists. Either you had a friend in the Anglo-Indian community who would smuggle you one of the plum cakes made from Aunty Maisie’s special recipe, or you went to Nahoum’s, where Solomon (now deceased) and David Nahoum held the fort. This 1902 establishment in New Market remains a tradition in itself, from the days when Nahoum Israel Mordecai sold baklava and cheese samusaks to its present-day status as the dowager lady of Calcutta’s Christmas traditions.
The scent of Nahoum’s plum cakes — made, in a style Dickens would have approved of, with raisins and sultanas rather than plums — filled the otherwise noisome alleys of Newmarket for months in advance. Their presentation hasn’t changed in years; the cakes are wrapped in brown paper, stored in glass-topped shelves with dark wooden frames.
I am aware that, living in a city where even the smallest patisserie in Defence Colony or Vasant Vihar offers stollen, two kinds of Christmas cake, four kinds of Christmas cookies (including rosa and almond), and even traditional mince pies and figgy pudding, I am being unreasonable. But I would trade all of these right now for a plum pudding in that plain white box with the blue lettering that says, simply, Nahoum’s. It contained not just some of the best plum cake in the world, but the spirit of a Calcutta Christmas.
[Nilanjana S Roy is a Delhi-based freelance writer]
