Christmas Traditions in the United Kingdom

Among the things I remember most about Christmas growing up in South Yorkshire, are the mouth-watering smells emanating from our kitchen in a typical mining village home.

The kitchen wasn't large at all, but it was modern by the standards of that day.  There was a double gas-ring on which pans holding various vegetables were shuffled around as needed.  The main cast-iron fireplace with its side oven would be performing at maximum capacity with bread baking inside while pots and kettles were brought to the boil over the open hot coals.  Soon the bread would be removed sending its mouth-watering aroma wafting throughout the house and oven space reorganised for the annual roast to sizzling busily inside.  The "copper" in the corner of the kitchen (a copper tub heated by an open fire underneath and in which the weekly laundry was boiled clean) had already been emptied of all the white linens that would be used to decorate the main table in our living room.

In the living room itself, the Christmas tree had been unpacked and assembled and it occupied one corner.  It had been carefully decorated with some precious and incredibly fragile ornaments, among which several small thin candles had been mounted on the branches waiting to be lit.  The fire in the living room fireplace was warming the room against the cold chill of the frosty air outside and everybody exchanged opinions about the prospects of snow.  Presents had already been ripped open earlier that day and where possible, the wrapping paper was carefully flattened and folded up for use next year.

These were the war years and everything was saved to be reused over and over again.  Even the portion of pig that was our main meat course had been fed during the previous year by all the peelings and scraps saved from the kitchen.  Rationing was hard and food was scarce, so it was considered a privilege to be one of the families chosen to feed a "secret pig" and thus earn a piece of the carcass when it was finally butchered.  Oh, and did I mention that the pig was not registered with the Ministry of Agriculture?  Funny, it must have slipped my memory …!

People would be amazed today that anyone could cook a full Christmas meal on the rudimentary equipment in her small kitchen, but mum always managed to produce the tastiest and marvellous titbits from such ancient appliances, and in all truth, I don't see any of these modern labour-saving wonders doing nearly so well.

Of course, speaking like this does make me sound old – and I am old now, but not quite as old as the dinosaurs which roamed the fields and woodlands outside … at least, that is what I tell the kids in the parish today, and incredibly, they seem to believe it!  (I wonder if they would be interested in some swamp land …)

Anyway, with the house permeating with fresh baking smells from the kitchen, we finally settled down at table.  The presents were all forgotten for a while, as it was time to pull the Christmas crackers and extract the traditional paper party hats.  With each of us adorned with our paper crowns the first course was served: thick, savoury vegetable soup made from anything that was left over from the main cooking menu.  Then the main meat course with the pork roast neatly sliced by dad's special Sheffield steel carving knife he and mum had received as a wedding present several years before.  He loved to make such a show of sharpening the knife on its matching steel.  Then some mashed and some baked potatoes from the meat roast pan were added along with Brussel sprouts and turnips (the turnips actually came from gleaning the neighbouring field after the harvest), carrots and cabbage were added (there were always carrots and cabbage from dad's garden), and finally, the main attraction: Yorkshire pudding covered with thick brown savoury gravy.

You know, there's a secret to properly cooking Yorkshire pudding.  The deep metal pan holding the fat must actually be smoking before the pudding batter is poured in and cooked in the oven.  Most people, who venture to cook their own Yorkshire pudding today, just pour in the mixture when they think the grease is hot enough, but to get the pudding to cook and rise properly, the fat has to be smoking hot.  Go ahead and try it for yourself.

Today modern people wonder how such a dish came to be called a "pudding" and how it was that a pudding was served with the main meat course.  But of course, it wasn't always thus.  Two thousand years before, the Romans occupied our land and, like all soldiers did at the time, they would pillage and plunder the area villages looking for food.  We have to thank the Romans for bringing in snails – which now infest our gardens – but when they weren't eating snails, they were out looking for our famous Yorkshire pudding.  You see in those days, the pudding was served last as a dessert: a proper pudding, but those canny Romans knew this so they carefully timed their raids to coincide with the serving of our prized pud!  As you can imagine, this did not sit well with the local villagers so they hit upon a plan.  Now, rather than serve the Yorkshire pudding last and risk its confiscation, it became the practise to serve it first and along with the meat course and thus when the greedy Roman soldiers broke down the doors expecting their prize of Yorkshire pudding all they found were the contented smiles of the occupants.

It's a lovely story, of course, and one which we Yorkshire folk love to tell and re-tell.  But is it true?  I will leave that up to you to decide for yourselves.

Anyway, after the dinner plates had been cleared away it was time for the "other" pudding.  Outside the war years it was possible to get figs and other exotic fruits with which to make a traditional Figgy pudding, but severe rationing and shortages during the war meant that we would be lucky if there was a proper dessert at all.  In case you were wondering, Figgy pudding is a pudding resembling a paler coloured Christmas pudding but containing figs. The pudding may be baked, steamed in the oven, boiled or fried and Figgy pudding dates back to 16th century England.  If you would like a recipe, I can recommend this BBC website: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/851637/figgy-christmas-pudding. 

But even if Figgy pudding was off the war-time menu for us, Mum was unusually good at saving ration coupons with which to stock up on some other items with which to produce a magnificent multi-coloured and carefully layered trifle.  Now this is a dish that usually takes a few days to produce.  First you need a large glass bowl at the bottom of which is a layer of sponge cake.  Now add some sherry to the sponge cake (the more the merrier as they say) and let it soak in.  Then add whatever berries are available: late blackberries, black currants even sliced and pre-cooked rhubarb and add that on top of the sherry-soaked sponge.  Then a layer of red jelly (gelatine) is added which seals in the fruit and the sponge cake soaked with the all-important sherry.  The large glass bowl must be covered and left to set properly, because the next layer will be a golden layer of thick custard which is poured carefully on top of the red jelly.  Then, the custard must be left for a day to properly set before another layer is added: a layer of raspberry or strawberry jelly – with some small chunks of fruit added.  The jelly is ever-so-carefully poured over the thick custard and then left to set for several more hours.  Adding another layer – this time of a coloured blancmange and yet another layer of jelly depends upon the size and depth of the glass bowl but the whole idea is to build up a multi-layered dish with each coloured layer visible through the glass until the final layer is added: thick whipped cream with crumbled ginger biscuits and chopped nuts spread loosely on top with a few random cherries to stare out at you.  Even in wartime, mum could always find a source for cream … no-one ever asked and she never told, but we did consume the trifle as though there was no tomorrow.  And truthfully, the Anderson bomb shelter in our garden was a constant reminder that tomorrow was never, ever, guaranteed.

With the table cleared and the weak afternoon midwinter sunlight about to disappear, the room became quiet as we each sat in our chairs to allow the magnificent wartime meal to settle into our stomachs and into our memories.  The glow from the fire matched the softer glow from the thin candles on the Christmas tree (now carefully lit) and before you knew it, it was suddenly "the time".  Reaching over to the wireless set, dad first made sure that the accumulator wires were properly connected, then with a flourish he switched it on and we watched the valves light up.  Twiddling mysteriously with the tuning dial the wireless produced first a humming sound with an odd whistle and some soft crackling, then a snatch of dance music was audible here and there; then there was another whistle and hum before we heard a snatch of someone speaking in a foreign language.  Suddenly he had it tuned into the BBC Home Service and we heard the radio pips counting down the time before the chimes of Big Ben boomed into the living room.  There was a brief announcement from somebody in the London studio and then the halting and so carefully enunciated words of King George VI entered our home, and we fell silent as he delivered his Christmas message to a beleaguered nation.

Hollywood has immortalised the King's Speech into a film of the same name, but none of us knew then he had his now famous speech impediment.  For us he was simply the King, and the voice carried a quiet and positive reassurance that we would all get through this with God's help and that there would be an end, one day, to all the bombing and soon all our fighting men would return home victorious.  Then the national anthem struck up and we all stood and together sang the words … along with every household in Britain because that is what we did in those days.  Those times brought a nation together, and when VE day arrived, the parties in the streets went on for days as neighbours got together to celebrate the victory and that we had peace once more.

How times have changed.  Today my modern kitchen is equipped with a convection oven (whatever that is) but maintains cooking temperatures to a precise degree.  There is a hob with multiple rings on it, all to regulate the cooking and simmering temperatures.  There is a microwave oven for all those "pierce and ping" dishes in my freezer (pierce the lid and remove when the microwave pings).  But none of them seem to produce quite the same fare as that which I enjoyed when I was a lad.

Memories!  They are all memories now, but the memory that is the most persistent is the olfactory one remembering the delicious smells emanating from a small kitchen in an ordinary home located in a Yorkshire mining village during wartime years.

Happy Christmas, everyone!