Our Changing Tastes

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 854, 24 December 1929, Page 8

Our Changing Tastes

Fewer Christmas Puddings

FEWER plum puddings and less meat are to be seen on the family board at Christmas time nowadays. More sensible food and less of it, in fact, now embraces the ingredients of Yuletide fare. Shopkeepers are busy selling for the festival, but the growing inclination of people to spend the holidays out of doors has changed the gastronomic taste.

In a country of the description of New Zealand, where Christmas is celebrated in the middle of summer, it is only a matter of time when the last vestige of old Home Yuletide customs will have completely disappeared. Already they are fast diminishing. The English Christmas, spent as it is essentially indoors, is eminently suited to the retention of the huge, hot dinner, with its attendant customary dishes. Under the Pacific sun these delicacies become a discomfort rather than a luxury. Aucklanders will appreciate these sentiments, for there is no- place in the Dominion less fitted for heavy Christmas dinners than this semitropical province. Fruit is comparatively plentiful; salads are simply made and distinctly palatable: strawberries mingle sueculently with the nourishing cream from outlying suburbs. In circumstances such as these, what call is there for heavy food on a hot day? Yet custom dies hard. Grocers’ assistants are now busy parcelling up large numbers of shop-made plumpuddings—not mother’s family pudding in a cloth, but diminutive and highly-seasoned' things turned out of a factory-made basin or tin. It represents the last appeal of the plum pudding. BARONIAL FEASTS Looking back a few hundred years, one sees the hearty and profuse—if rude and unrefined—hospitality of the ancient baronial feasts at Christmastide. The traditional boar’s head, borne with grand pomp to the feudal chieftain’s table, was the important dish at the feast. Mustard was esential, and in fact when Parliament strove to abolish Christmas, the greatest outcry was not from the eaters of boar’s head, but from the mustard manufacturers, because of diminished demand. /

Pheasants, geese and capons were inferior only to peacocks as a Yuletide delicacy. But the long-standing element of the feast, and one which survives in different form to the present day, was the Christmas pie—the mince pie, which was popular under the name of mutton pie as early as 1596. The stock of these pies were as a rule guarded all through the eve of Christmas lest some sweettoothed thieves lay felonous fingers upon them.

Then plum pudding, doubtless the product of evolution from the old plum pottage—which was served with the first course of Christmas dinner—and the plum porridge, became popular contributions to the festive celebration.

The closest approach to the present day favourite appears in a cookery book dated 1675, though as late as 1801 there is found mention of the "lucious plum porridge.” Later a concoction resembling this mixture, appeared in culinary guides as “plumb pudding.” For several reasons, however, there is* today less feasting and more relaxation upon Christmas Day. Quick transport has brought people within easy reach of beaches and holiday resorts. Privately-owned motor-cars are increasing numerically every year, and camping at the roadside and upon specially delegated areas throughout the whole country was never more popular than it is at the present time. PICNIC CHRISTMAS This means Christmas out of doors, and consequently less devotion to the family board. There is always a certain amount of meat. The ham habit is hardly dying out at all, for a cooked ham keeps well and relieves the housewife of much of Yuletide’s attendant drudgery. But people are eating more fruit. Hot foods are not appreciated. There is no novelty in a big dinner, and fruit salad takes the place of the boiled pudding. A picnic Christmas with sensible foods suited to climatic exigencies, it seems, is the current desire.

Dried fruits —currants, raisins, muscatels, each bearing its traditional significance—are still demanded. Here and there, but very seldom, one surprises a family riotously engaged in the old-time game “snap-dragon.” In liquor, this generation unquestionably is more temperate at Christmas —however torrid the summer day —for our ancestors regarded the liquor as a speciality at this season, as the ancient and popular carol reveals : Every neighbour shares the bowl; Drinks of the spicy liquor deep; Drinks his fill without control, Till he drowns his care in sleep.” L.J.C.