November means Christmas Cakes

I went to a rural, three-teacher National School in Co. Roscommon. In those days family sizes were bigger. Our's was a family of five, which was kind of average for the time. But there was a set of twins in my class, and their's was twice the size - the twins coming somewhere in the middle of three other boys and five girls. They were very aware, therefore, of the sacrifices that their parents made to rear such a clann, and I was always struck by their pride when reporting events from home. Invariably these reports were preceded by a question to the listener: you might be asked, in May, for example, whether you had yet ‘turned all yer (pronounced "year")turf’. You would answer proudly that you had – ‘finished it all that weekend’. But your boast would be short lived as you quickly learned that the twins had worked with their dad til sun-down on Saturday, and had now finished all the clamping. (Clamping, of course, being a whole stage beyond turning, in the turf-saving process.)

That was a typical May conversation. But pride was alive and well all year round.

*

Today is Monday, the 16th of November 2009. The 16th of November 1981 would have been a Monday too. The black board would have stated this at the top – ‘Inniu an Luan, an 16ú lá de mhí Samhain …’ And it might well have been on this day twenty-eight years ago that another leading question was cast in my direction…

- So, has yer mother made yer Christmas cake yet?

She had. In fact only that weekend she had made a second one. And had even put the almond icing on the first one she had made during the previous week! My excitement grew. This looked water-tight. At last, I thought, a chance to get one up…

- She has – she’s even made two.

I held back from revealing the ‘almond icing’ bit – kept the proverbial ‘icing on the cake’ in reserve as a final blow in the event that Mrs. H— might have, for once, been restricted by the more mundane duties of a busy home-maker, and not had a chance to ice her cake.

But the twins’ reply was instant and deadly. The trap that had been laid with care now snapped its jaws firmly.

- Our mother did three – and that was just this weekend.

Then the jaws of the trap proceeded to chew steadily.

- That’s seven she’s made so far.
- And she’ll be icing two of them tonight.
- Not just the almond icing – the real icing.
- And she’s making two more next weekend.
- That’ll be it, then.
- Ya – that’ll be nine Christmas cakes.
- And that’ll be it, coz you should only make Christmas cakes in November.
- You could make, say, an ordinary cake, alright.
- And she’ll probably make loads of them.
- Ordinary cakes.
- But no more Christmas cakes.
- So unless ye make seven Christmas cakes next weekend, ye won’t have as many as us.
- And that’ll never happen.
- Ne-ver.

The image of all those golden brown cakes – some iced, some still steaming and wrapped in grease-proof paper was forever etched in by mind. A symbol of the glory and beauty of an honest, innocent Ireland.

*

In 2009 my generation’s weekend’s don’t seem to be as full of such glory as those weekends of yore. (Indeed. Thirty years of elapsed time qualify our memories for the ‘yore’ category.) We have moved on since then. Moved ‘up in the world’. Become richer in belongings, and poorer in time. Poorer too in beauty – in more than one sense!

Last Saturday morning, at swimming with the kids, I was chatting to another ‘poor, rich, inglorious’ dad. Someone else was being paid to do the teaching, so the dads were filling their time discussing life.
The other dad said to me, ‘we won’t feel Christmas coming now, will we?’
‘No,’ I replied.
The image of the nine Christmas cakes came into my mind, so I tried a line: ‘Time to be making the Christmas cake, if you’re going to make it at all … ’

That line often falls on ears uneducated in the wisdom and ways of traditional Ireland. But on Saturday, as he scanned the pool for his son’s progress with the breast-stroke, my companion’s eyes revealed a ‘knowing-what-you-mean’ and betrayed a twinkle of nostalgia.
‘That’s right. I was down at home in Mayo on Sunday and my mother must have had four pots on the boil with puddings in them.’

Knowing where I stood in the pecking order of Roscommon home-baking greats, I wasn’t going to top this Mayo man. But we had a good chat about cakes and puddings and all of those home-baking values that, we agreed, were going to be lost on the generation who now availed of the wonderful facilities of places like this swimming pool. We went on to observe that our own wives, for some reason, didn’t seem to practice those same, traditional, home-making skills with the same fervour that they must have seen their own mothers do. Maybe it was because they hadn’t enough time – busy with work and that, we supposed; and shopping and stuff. Yeah.

But still. Even beyond cooking. What was going to happen to all the skills like sewing and dress-making and darning and knitting that were passed down through the generations?

By a convenient chance, I even happened to be wearing a wool jumper that my mother knitted for me when I was in college twenty years ago. (Twenty? Yes. Ouch!) It was grist for our mill. My friend couldn’t believe how well it looked. And do you think some of them would knit something like that now-a-days? We were on a roll. Our grandfathers would have been proud.

But seriously, were our children now destined to perish in today’s cold world, for want of a good wool jumper, wearing only them skimpy clothes that wouldn’t cover your hand? Or be poisoned with all them Es you get in processed food these days, for want of the few minutes it takes to throw together some flour and eggs and a fistful of raisins and fire it in the oven? What good was their breast stroke to them then? Or the butterfly? And all these new facilities? When they’d be dying with colds and flus and not the strength to use them. Life’s priorities were all wrong.

In the end we concluded that the future of the country was now up to us. The fathers. If our wives would not diligently pass on the wholesome arts of baking and sewing and knitting and everything else, then we had to do it. Yes. This generation held the holy grail, but we couldn’t just rely on the other half to pass it on. Didn’t we fathers of 2009 see our mothers doing this stuff too, and didn’t we know it just as well – if not better? Wouldn’t we be just as guilty of failing our children if we didn’t pass on that knowledge? Something had to be done. And the work would start here. Today. This was November. Christmas was coming. And it would simply not happen if we didn’t act today and make, at least one, Christmas cake.

So if you’ve been too busy recently, and didn’t find time nor reason to give to some of the traditional pleasures, here’s how my family arrived early this Monday morning at having one steaming, golden-brown Christmas cake emerge from our simmering oven.

*

We had to go home after swimming. Before exciting the children with the prospect of an impending lesson for life, we had to make sure that this project was not going to interfere with the ‘other’ plans that are made for weekends. At home, the idea was greeted with general, if guarded approval. Indeed there were other plans: the puncture on the wheel of the buggy had to be repaired, bicycle breaks had to be repaired, there was a room to be tidied, and some miniature Sylvanian ice-creams had to be recovered from a u-bend under a sink (don’t ask!)

Assurances were offered – that a Christmas cake project would not compromise these tasks. The path was cleared, and the kitchen table was cleared. The children of the new millennium were prepared to sit up and listen.

*

The first thing to be aware of, and to plan for, is that projects like this need to be divided mentally into discrete, homogeneous sub-tasks – chunks that can independently start and finish, with long time-gaps between them if necessary (to keep those ‘other’ plans on track, or just to keep emergencies at bay – like feeding starving mouths that can’t fend for themselves, for example).

I’ve identified five such chunks.

The first is to get a good cook-book from a shelf, look up the index and find the page with the ingredients. (The first recipe I got required soaking fruit for three days – not ideal for a weekend activity, so we got a different book.) Either way, with the right book you can simply write down the list of things to get, or see if you have any of it already, and just write down the stuff you don’t have.

There’s nearly always something odd that you’ve never heard of before. In our case it was crystallized ginger. Google images was handy just to show us what it looked like, but it was still going to be a challenge to find, we figured, in the standard Home Baking isle of Dunnes.

Anyway, that’s the first chunk done – making the list of things to get.

The next chunk is getting the stuff. Ideally if it could be coincided with the weekly shopping in the supermarket, that would be good. This way you involve the children, while also freeing up whoever’s left at home to break the back on the other jobs – and you come home to a clean house, with fresh air billowing through it, washing machines going, sun streaming in the windows, and an overall sense of cheery control.

Getting the crystallized ginger can be seen either as an exciting treasure hunt, or a stressful health-food shop-hopping odyssey, with too many kids in tow. I got a happy medium, thankfully – happened upon a great little place back the West on Sea Road. Right next door to the printing shop where I had to get some posters printed for our upcoming drama production. It looked just like a place that might have crystallized ginger. And the man was cheerful. And the woman found it eventually. She was sure they had it – and they had.

So we’re in business. Everything we need in a small, flat box: raisins, mixed peel, dried apricots, stoned dates, crushed almonds, eggs and butter. Sultanas, currants, Irish whiskey, flour, light brown sugar, orange zest, mixed spice, nutmeg, ground cinnamon, a ten-inch tin and grease-proof paper already back at the ranch.

The third homogeneous sub-task is probably the most satisfying: putting all the dried fruit in a bowl and dousing it with whiskey (or brandy). Once this is mixed well, it needs to be left for two hours. This we did on Saturday, and that was it. We only got time during the rest of the evening to visit the magic bowl of fruit and alcohol occasionally, to give it another satisfying stir, and throw in an extra dash or the crature just in case. France beat Ireland one-nil. Then we went to bed.

*

On Sunday, in a gap of time between breakfast and lunch, the troops gathered around the fourth piece of the puzzle – the somewhat dreaded (for adults), I always think, and mysterious (for everyone) cutting of grease-proof paper to line the tin. How many layers? How many nicks? Pie times the diameter. Minimise waste. But above all make sure the damn cake doesn’t end up stuck in the tin. Got it done. Left it aside. Out of the way. Ready for the final assault.

Final phase five is the longest – it would have to wait until after the county hurling final. Portumna five-nineteen, Loughrea one-twelve. A family there supporting Portumna all wore hand-knitted caps and scarves. Fair play to them. And Ireland beat Chile in hockey. Fair play to them.

The end game.

First cream the butter in a bowl until soft. Then add the brown sugar and blend until fluffy. Add the eggs, one-at-a-time. Then the almonds. Then the orange zest. Sieve the flour in with the three spices, and mix forever.

Add all the fruit into the big, glorious mix, and forgive the twins for always feeling so proud.

All that butter mixed with egg and sugar – and we used to love to eat that stuff?!

Mix and wish and don’t tell anyone. Mix again, and wish again – a family wish each this time – wishes that stay in the family.

All into the cake tin – mixture, wishes, hopes and everything. Into the simmering oven over night, while we slept and dreamed. And on this morning, Luan, 16ú Samhain 2009, before we went to school to meet our friends, golden brown steam filled our senses, to send us on our way.