THE SPICES OF CHRISTMAS

Tom Doorley

When I was a child, the smell of Christmas was quite complex: pine from the tree, spices from all the baking, booze but purely for the pudding and the cake as my parents were virtually teetotal. I suppose that made the aroma of a mini-bottle of Power’s Irish Whiskey going into the pudding mixture really quite heady. And, of course, my mother’s (and maternal grandmother’s) recipe also called for a bottle of Guinness.

 

My other grandmother had an unfortunate experience when running some errands for her daughter-in-law. The time for pudding making was at hand and my mother asked her to get a bottle of stout when he was down at the shops. My grandmother, I should add, was a rather formidable lady of extreme respectability. She had strong Calvinist genes and I’m not sure she ever soiled her lips with alcohol, not even a small Sherry on Christmas Day.

 

So, when she went into the local pub and requested “a bottle of Guinness” at eleven o’clock in the morning, she nearly passed out when the “curate” behind the counter promptly poured her order into a glass. My parents were highly amused but I’m not sure the poor woman ever fully recovered.

Aromas and fragrances are very evocative and when I smell cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and ginger I’m transported back to when I used to “help” my mother as she stirred intoxicating mixtures of dried fruit, spice, brown sugar, butter and various alcoholic beverages in the big cream-coloured Mason bowl.

 

The resulting Christmas pudding was an impressive affair, remarkably solid – thanks, I expect, to a significant payload of suet – and it needed to be boiled for hours. For a couple of days, the walls of our kitchen dripped with condensation. And when it was ready to eat – just a sliver after Christmas dinner – it was exceptionally good in the following days when cut up and fried in butter until the edges became deliciously crusty. This was eaten with a generous splash of cold cream.

 

When it comes to cooking, and not just for Christmas, spices matter; and so does their quality. Spices age and eventually lose much of their flavour and pungency. So it makes sense to come to a spice specialist, like Asia Market, when shopping for these delicious exotics.

The key spices of Christmas deliver a sense of the Orient, the flavours of far-off warmer lands in the depths of the Irish Winter. They also have a heritage in Irish cooking that derives from the days when spices were very expensive commodities, luxurious substances that could be traded in much the same way as currencies or precious metals.

 

Centuries ago, nutmeg was the rarest and most expensive spice of them all. It’s the nut or stone in the fruit of a tree called Myristica fragrans, native to Indonesia which is still a major exporter of the spice. It was the Dutch colonists who brought it to Europe.

 

Mace is the outer coating of the nutmeg seed, its flavour being similar but more subtle. Whole mace is a tough lattice-like material, so it is more often used in powdered form. The most fragrant form of nutmeg is the freshly grated nut – the rich used to carry their own silver grater when nutmeg was, if you like, the white truffle or caviare of the time.

 

For baking, powdered spices are the most convenient way to deliver plenty of flavour but whole spices retain their character much more effectively and their fragrance and flavour are more layered and complex.

 

Allspice is not a mixture of spices but it does seem to combine the flavours of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and black pepper and grows as a berry on the Jamaican Myrtle Pepper tree or Pimento dioica. Not surprisingly, it’s a major element in West Indian cooking. In Ireland, allspice is one of the key flavours that make Irish sausages so distinctive – apart from being a must in most people’s Christmas baking.

 

Cinnamon has been used for longer than any other spice and the ancient Egyptians even used it in their embalming process! Whole cinnamon is the inner bark of the Cinnamonum verum, native to Southern India and Sri Lanka but now grown all over Asia and elsewhere. Not only is it delightfully fragrant, cinnamon has anti-bacterial, anti-viral and anti-fungal properties. Interestingly, the biggest consumer of cinnamon is Vietnam.

Gingerbread men and women have been made since Elizabethan times and dried powdered ginger has long been used in Irish Christmas puddings and fruitcakes. In its crystallised form, ginger makes an outstanding steamed pudding (well worth the time it takes) and, of course, fresh ginger is now available everywhere in Ireland. There was a time when it was only buyable dried – those were the days when a “posh” starter in hotel restaurants was a slice of melon topped with a glacé cherry and sprinkled with ginger.

 

We have come a long way since then, but at Christmas for many of us we return to the spices of childhood in the way we used to enjoy them then.