Tasty narratives 22/12/07
Normally we eat The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle on Christmas Day, but since we’re going to friends for the feast this year, I suspect it may be A Christmas Carol with all the trimmings. Jumping the gun a bit, we’ve already tucked into The Mayor of Casterbridge and jolly filling it was too. As devotees of Victorian literature may have guessed, I refer respectively to goose, turkey and the proto Christmas pud known as frumenty. For most of us, the choice of Yuletide belt-strainer depends on habit, tastiness or affordability, but this does not apply to novelists. Their preference is dictated by narrative potential.
A turkey acts as dénouement of A Christmas Carol, written by Dickens in 1843, due to the prodigious size that these fowls can attain. The prize example sent to the Cratchit family by the transformed Scrooge – “He could never have stood upon his legs that bird. He would have snapped them off short in a minute, like sticks of sealing wax” – is reminiscent of the gargantuan bird recently “pardoned” by President Bush in the annual bit of hokum on the White House lawn. Scrooge’s purchase took place on the morning of 25 December, when the poulterer was still open. Then as now, the really big turkeys were the last to be sold.
In first half of the 19th century, roast beef and goose remained favourite Christmas fare, but the turkey was catching up fast. Until the coming of the railways, flocks equipped with little leather boots were herded from East Anglia (geese had their feet dipped in tar), though Scrooge’s monster could not have made the trek. The generosity of his gesture is underlined by Mrs Beeton (1860): “The turkey is one of the most difficult birds to rear.” Nevertheless, I remain unconvinced by Scrooge’s metamorphosis. The cookery advice of the unreformed miser sounds more plausible, if less festive: “Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding.”
In The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892), Conan Doyle’s plot hinges on a goose’s crop (a pouch in the gullet where food is stored). At 4am on Christmas Day, a passer-by picks up a goose dropped during an assault on Tottenham Court Road. At home, he finds a jewel in its crop, which he brings to Sherlock Holmes. The detective instantly recognises the gem: “There have been two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide and several robberies brought about for the sake of this 40-grain weight of crystallised carbon.” Holmes ingeniously tracks the goose to a Bloomsbury pub, thence to a stallholder in Covent Garden Market and finally to a flock raised at 117 Brixton Road (which must have been a bit noisy for the neighbours). The miscreant turns out to be the smallholder’s felonious brother, who, in a moment of panic, utilised the live goose as a hiding place for the stolen gem.
A brilliant piece of detection, except, as Leslie S.Klinger, editor of the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, points out: a) Covent Garden was a vegetable market; b) The only gem composed of crystallised carbon is diamond; c) The goose does not have a crop. Despite these slips, it is the perfect Christmas yarn concluding with seasonal forgiveness (Holmes releases the perpetrator) and a feast in 221B Baker Street: “Doctor, we will begin another investigation, in which a bird will also be the chief feature.”
Frumenty, a dish of cracked wheat boiled in milk, is described in Steve Roud’s folklore guide The English Year as “made for everyday use and festive occasions (especially Christmas)”. It initiates the tragic chain of events in Thomas Hardy’s gloomy yarn The Mayor of Casterbridge when a hay-trusser called Michael Henchard sells his wife after eating four basins. If this sounds an extreme reaction, it should be explained that his frumenty was laced with rum.
At my request, Mrs W bravely prepared this wheat porridge, which is still eaten at Christmas Eve in parts of North Yorkshire. Once so common that the recipe was scarcely ever written down, you can find it on a few websites. A luxury version – tinged with nutmeg, sweetened with honey and gemmed with swollen raisins – eventually became Christmas pudding. “Not bad, but it’s hard to see what’s so festive about it,” I said. Promising Mrs W that she would not come under the hammer, I reached for a bottle of Havana Club rum. Though the super-charged frumenty was a distinct improvement, it proved to be hefty fare. How Michael Henchard managed to get through four basins of the stuff is a mystery. If he had, it is more likely that he would fall asleep than become “brilliantly quarrelsome”.
“Well, I’m not sold on it,” drolly quipped Mrs W. She was much more taken with my alternative suggestion for a literary tipple at Christmas: Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (the Vesper cocktail) shaken with Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (ice).
The miscreant, in a moment of panic, utilised the live goose as a hiding place for the stolen gem.