Tales of a Christmas cake

It is, of course, possible to binge on any type of cake this festive season. But did you know that the 'real' Christmas cake was not a cake at all. Instead, it was a humble porridge, eaten on Christmas Eve to line the stomach in preparation for the grand celebrations.

In fact, the original plum pudding was sweet-savoury. It contained bits of meat and spices along with sugar and bread crumbs to bind things together and also spice, lemon juice and liquor like wine, sherry and later rum. It was only in Victorian England that the plum pudding as we know it came into existence as a legit dessert.

More fascinating than the actual recipe are the old rituals for stirring it (this was made on the last Sunday before Advent and each family member stirred the pudding making a wish and placing silver charms in the mixture). Your luck for the year would naturally depend on the charm you found in the pudding.

Studies suggest that these rituals date back to a pre-Christian nature-worshipping world where charms – and food that you ate -- were used as sympathetic magic rituals.

The plum pudding began to change shape and texture over time. Rich homes in Elizabethan England started replacing oatmeal of the porridge with fine wheat flour and adding butter and eggs to hold the cake together better.

Each region in Europe has its own version of the plum cake. In Italy, the traditional cake is the panettone, which is really more a sweet bread filled with raisins and pine nuts. The fruitiness of this tall cake also comes from citron — a lemon like citrus fruit.

Chef Ashutosh from the Hyatt Regency, Gurgaon, replaces the citron with lime and orange juice and rind and incorporates ingredients such as nutmeg and almonds.

In Germany, stollen is the traditional fruit bread for Christmas. It usually has spices such as cardamom (instead of just all-spice or cinnamon), orange peel and candied orange (instead of citron or lemon) and marzipan.

Before we come to the definitive plum cake as we know it — a legacy of Victorian England — there are other traditional Christmas cakes that don't necessarily contain dried fruit and nuts. There is the pandoro (or pan d'oro; 'golden bread'), a tradition from Verona. The golden colour comes from the many egg yolks added to the batter. The cake/bread is dusted with sugar and baked in star-shaped moulds.

Then there is the yule log — buche de noel in the French tradition — a sponge cake covered in chocolate and rolled to resemble a log. It is then dusted with sugar and decorated with a sprig of holly.

The plum cake, as we know it in India, has come to us through the colonial connection. Chef Girish Nayak, pastry chef at Delhi's Monkey Bar and Bangalore's Olive Beach, points out that the perfect plum cake should look dark, rich and moist. Must-have ingredients are sultanas, dried apricots, quince, candied orange, candied papaya, dried figs, nuts, wine, rum brandy, spice mix (cinnamon, clove, cardamom, nutmeg), eggs, flour, dried cherries, ginger and a "nice big gold coin"!

As you bite into the plum cake, the chef says, just go by how it feels in your mouth: Rich and moist, dense but not dry, a balance of fruit, sweet and liquor.

Ingredients: 
Butter, eggs, flour, sugar (brown and white), golden syrup/ treacle, ground almonds, candied peel, raisins, currants, sultanas, chopped almonds, candied ginger, glacier cherries, nutmeg powder, all-spice powder, cinnamon powder, brandy for soaking fruits, rum

Method:
Mix and soak fruits in brandy for a few weeks. Cream butter, sugar, add beaten eggs. Mix the flour with the fruits so fruits do not sink to the bottom of the mixture. Add fruit and plain flour to the egg butter mixture alternately and mix. Add golden syrup/ treacle at the end. Baking time depends on the amount of mixture. Moderate oven to bake through the dense cake mixture. Bake the cake two weeks before it is cut. The day after baking, make small holes and pour rum inside. Let the cake soak it.