Memories of christmas celebrations
For Christmas is tradition time
Traditions that recall
The precious memories down the years
The sameness of them all
— Helen Lowrie Marshall
Childhood memories of the Christmas season begin with my mother cleaning a pile of assorted dry fruits and nuts and then soaking it in liberal quantities of rum for a few days so that the fruits exuded a tantalising aroma of rum. The Christmas cakes would be baked in batches and then stored in a wooden box. My mother maintained that her cakes could last for six months and would only become softer with aging.
Alongside the cakes, she would also make other delicacies like murukkus, kalkals, and rose cookies.
There would be a stream of visitors on Christmas day and all the items would be served with grape and ginger wine. The recipes for both the wines were given to my mother by some Anglo-Indian friends. Bangalore was famous for black grapes and, a month before Christmas, these would be cleaned and put into large earthenware jars with screw tops. I remember my mother opening the jar at regular intervals and stirring the contents as the gases from the fermenting grapes would need to be released. While the grape wine was popular, I preferred the ginger wine as it was delicious to sip on a cold day with the aftertaste of sweetened ginger lingering in the throat.
With Christmas approaching, it is with nostalgia that I recall such celebrations in these covid times.
When she was 90, Mrs Rachel Chacko published a compilation of her recipes in Mother’s Recipes: A Manual for Indian Daughters (available on Amazon). She has very graciously, through her daughter Geeta Verghese (an LSR alumna), shared 2 recipes (Fruit Cake and OT Ginger Wine) from her book, on ELSA Table. These can be accessed at https://elsatable.com/recipe/fruit-cake/ and https://elsatable.com/recipe/ot-ginger-wine/ .
