The cultural cuisine of many Immigrants followed cooks and chefs across the Atlantic over the China Sea, the Steppes of Russia , The Lakes of Lithuania , The Boot of Sicily. Additionally wines and herbs of Province were off to America.
We have the most diverse and bountiful food supply source in the world. Pasta from Italy Paella from Spain , Pierogis from Poland , dare I mention potatoes from Ireland ? The humbled spud which when it failed plunged the Irish into a pandemic of starvation. What did the Irish ever do for American cuisine ? Not much until recent times when Irish celebrity chefs can hold their own with the best. We can likely thank the Alans of Ballymaloe who were there ahead of the trend with TV shows , cooking schools , organic farms to fork. The US perfected the French Fry one of the world’s finest foods elevating the spud to a fast acting global belly buster.
What Irish cuisine migrated to America ?
If we’re talking corn beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day , forget it. I actually never celebrated with corn beef and cabbage until I came to America. Where did they come up with that one ? I asked a friend one year. I was playing my harp in an Irish restaurant and every customer had a plateful.
We had bacon and cabbage and parsley sauce in Ireland. Nothing without the parsley sauce , my mother would say , as she chopped away and made a roux.
Corned beef and cabbage was invented at a New York Jewish deli - my friend - an authority on Jewish delis -said.
The impoverished Irish at the time just acquiesced and there we had it - new Irish cuisine. The Jewish Deli having no truck with the genuine tribal edible artifact - bacon.
The Irish now have all manner of award winning chefs and Michelin star restaurants. Growing up in the 50s and 60s Arthur Frommer , the travel writer said if you want to eat well in Ireland , have breakfast three times a day. A bountiful start to the day with rashers of bacon and sausages , mushrooms , black and white pudding , grilled tomatoes , eggs generally fried and homemade brown bread. Three kinds of jam and marmalade. Not so much any more.
My mother was an excellent cook.
She never reduced our vegetables to a khaki colored slime. They were always electrifyingly green and with just enough bite to be considered done but not over cooked.
Her secret , a pinch of baking soda in the water. In the kitchen , as in life she rose above the bland ordinariness of some of her contemporaries.
The most complicated cooking -well actually it was baking -happened at the end of the autumn preferably the beginning of November.
The Christmas Plum Pudding -a descendant of its English cousin, The Figgy Pudding.
Competitive conversations abounded around the merits of the best family recipes. Dark versus the newer lighter , all depending on the amount of whiskey , Guinness stout , spices , length of cooking time, amount of fruit , mixed peel etc. Actual dried plums which would be prunes seemed to be absent from any recipe. I chopped up a few prunes in this year’s batch and now can justify calling it plum pudding.
I inherited a Plum Pudding Bible after my mother died and it now resides with me in Greenfield Ma . There are other how tos for removing rust from white sheets , curing scour in piglets ( I suppose that would be diarrhea - poor little piggies) and potash for fertilizing lawns , making carbolic soap and the recipe for Miss O’Leary’s Plum Pud.
Nothing fills me with more nostalgia than embarking on the ritual of the annual plum pudding marathon. Curiously it is not a tradition that has followed many of us across the Atlantic.
It is a labor-intensive business not to mention the overnight Bain Marie, the bath of water in which the pudding is steamed.
I received a catalog one year from Harrods of London who were exporting plum pudding‘s to the US for the princely sum of $100 each.
That’s what I’ll do this Christmas - I resolved. I’ll make some plum puddings and see if anyone likes them.
Maybe because of Harrods they’ll be making inroads into the Christmas culture of New England. I went on a marathon and I fobbed about a dozen of them off on various good natured friends and customers at my shop. They can double as a doorstop I said by way of an alternative. Each weighed between five and 6 pound apiece . I mailed a few to Canada’s Anglo Hiberno Christmas purists at $50 each . Including my cousin Ray, who is an expert at the lighting of the pud , a dramatic production one might have witnessed at Scrooge’s Cratchet Christmas table after his Epiphany. The postmistress in Deerfield is always delighted to see me coming.
My cousin John McMahon had mentioned a few times that he would like to learn to make one as his wife Donna is Jewish and most of his Christmas traditions had gone the way of the Magi.
Why don’t you come on over, I said on the appointed day , when I was assembling the dozens of ingredients.
Orange peel , lemon peel, raisins , sultanas , Angelica , mixed peel , almonds , almond flour , walnuts , dozens of eggs, flour , brown sugar , molasses , cinnamon , nutmeg , mace. Guinnes , rum , whiskey, brandy .
No wonder they keep for a year.
This is remarkably like the poet Emily Dickinson’s recipe for black cake. She was an award winning baker , better known in her day for her cakes than her poems. I speculated that maybe her Irish maid Margaret Maher had given her the recipe and instead of steaming it Emily came up with her own way of cooking it as a cake. Easier and doesn’t involve staying up all night making sure the water level can’t descend below the top of the pud.
So little wonder that it has not survived and that Christmas cookies and pie baking are the most unilaterally popular way of celebrating Christmas in the kitchen.
OK John , I said I’ll be doing them next Monday.
I can’t make it , he said with the disappointed air of a child who’s just discovered there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.
My friend Paul Boksberger in Ireland was embarking on something of the same order for the informal commercial market and he and his wife Helen were mixing their plum puddings in the bathtub. Paul, in his professional life is in charge of hygiene standards in restaurants and there’s no man better at sniffing out rat droppings in five star restaurant kitchens.
The hygiene in the bath tub for plum pudding mixing would be impeccable and unimpeachable.
After a week of steaming , cooking, wrapping and boxing up the lot , including a card with instructions for a new round of home steaming and a recipe for brandy butter.
No self respecting plum pudding can be served without it.
I had my batch already to go , some in the mail and others I delivered.
I was out of boxes by the time, I came to packaging John’s. I used the one in which I had just purchased a blender.
Did I mention that loaf after loaf of white bread has to be converted into breadcrumbs.
In Plum Pudding Paradise across the Irish Sea you can buy the breadcrumbs already made.
My reigning blender succumbed under the struggle , the engine overheated , groaned and stopped , its final whirr - a blender’s death rattle and caput.
Dead.
I bought a new one.
That’s done I thought with a procrastinator ‘s satisfaction that comes from getting it underway early enough. Full of smug virtue , good- I said - they wouldn’t get caught up in the Christmas rush -additionally I had put some little Christmas gifts for John‘s children in the box.
Several weeks went by , it was unusual that I didn’t hear from John since he had been so eager to resuscitate the Christmas pudding ritual.
On Christmas Eve he called to wish me a happy Christmas.
He didn’t mention that he received anything from me.
Did you get the plum pudding ? I asked , only slightly miffed.
He didn’t respond right away and when he did he wasn’t falling over himself with enthusiasm.
What ?
Is that what it was ? he said.
Yes , a plum pudding that you wanted to make with me - I went ahead and made it for you myself - instead.
If you want to warm it up , this is how you do it- I said.
I carried on with some other instructions and he ended the conversation abruptly.
I have to go now Donna needs me
OK John - Merry Christmas.
At about 11 PM I had a phone call.
Hello Rosemary , it’s John again
Hello John , how are you ?
Is everything ok?
I’m OK , but I just thought I’d call you because I didn’t want you to hear this on the 11 o’clock news.
Hear - what?
About the plum pudding.
What about the plum putting ?
When the box arrived and it was a blender box ,we already had a blender and I saw that it came from Caldors so I took it back to Caldors and got a cash refund.
A cash refund for my plum pudding.
How much was it worth ? I said.
The price of the blender - said he.
I can’t quite remember the exact sum.
I rushed back there right away to see if I could retrieve it and give back the money.
They had put it back on the shelf and it was already sold to somebody else.
Sold ?
So somebody else has a plum pudding under the Christmas tree instead of a blender.
We didn’t want you to hear it on the 11 o’clock news.
Hear it on the news ?
Yes !
They - thought it was such a unique Christmas Eve story they called channel 22 and the news crew wanted to come out and film the two of us in our Jewish Plum pudding- less kitchen.
Donna was horrified and said no , but the story had already been told by somebody else on radio, who heard it through the conversation at Caldors.
I would love to have heard it on the news , I said.
It might have revived the tradition.
The day after Christmas , Boxing Day , John was reunited with his plum pudding and the customer who didn’t want a doorstep or a plum pudding returned it to customer service demanding an explanation and a blender.
I’ll have to learn to light it said John , and I know how to make the brandy butter.
That could only have happened to you Rosemary.