Sharing Christmas

We hope that you carefully read your Christmas edition of NetWorks last year, and diligently created your own Christmas Pudding from scratch on stir-up Sunday! If you did you will be in for a treat, and we hope that anyone who has attempted the Watkins recipe enjoys it.

Christmas and food are inexorably entwined for most of us. Celebrations need good, rich, indulgent food, and whether you are celebrating the birth of Jesus, the gathering of family, or the end of the year, Christmas is certainly an important celebration.

We all have traditions associated with the time of year, often passed down through families. As a Cork-born lad, I, like many of my compatriots, were used to large family celebrations. Dining tables heaving with excellent and carefully prepared foods, rickety chairs that were gathered from sheds and attics, loud conversations, and louder laughter.

Every year I waited with anticipation and curiosity to see if I would be deemed old enough to end up at the ‘adult’ table. I regretfully remember that I was a good deal older than I thought necessary before I was granted that honour!

My mammy was an excellent cook and baker, and she had the family recipe book. As a result, the heavy responsibility of creating the Whitnell family Christmas cakes fell to her each year. Uncles and aunts, cousins and more would all want

their cake in time for the big day, and every year my wonderful mammy obliged. I have vivid memories of her in the kitchen, what felt like all day, with her big wooden spoon and huge cream mixing bowl, knocking up batch after batch of Christmas cake for the oven. I latterly found out that she may have had another very good reason for holding the recipe close to her chest. For a week before Christmas, when she was up early and the oven was working overtime, the whole household was all under the spell of silence.

Mammy had told me, my brothers, and sisters, that the cakes were incredibly fragile, and they must be allowed to cook without interruption. Any sudden or loud noises would be sure to interrupt the flow of gas to the cooker, and therefore interrupt the cake causing them to collapse completely!

Of course, none of us wanted to be responsible for the terrible calamity of a collapsed cake, especially a Christmas cake, as we would incur the (assumed) terrible wrath of the affected family member that went cake-less for the big day. Although loud noises bought about by excited children would be sure to interrupt the gas supply, mammy assured us that there was no such risk with music. Specifically, her music.

I remember her dancing around the kitchen beating the cake batter to songs from the radio, including her favourite from Marianne Faithful with ‘Dreaming my Dreams’.

This week of calm, while she was making cakes destined for Whitnell residences all over Cork, stuck with me. I asked her recently about it and she laughed; whoever could believe something as solid as a Christmas fruit cake could collapse!

She has been kind enough to send me the recipe, which you can see (wherever it ends on the page – left/below etc). I hope you have fun baking it and most importantly eating it. Should you wish to send me one, please feel free!

She assures me that a gas cooker is not integral to the production of a perfect cake, however if you want an excuse to bask in silence for a while, feel free to tell your children the same thing she told us. I can almost guarantee tiptoeing.

Mammy Whitnells Christmas Cake

INGREDIENTS

1 ½ lb Plain Flour 1 lb Butter

1 lb Brown Sugar 1 lb Sultanas

¼ lb Peel 1 Lemon (Juice)

¼ lb Ground Almonds ¼ lb Glace Cherries 1 Teaspoon Nutmeg

1 Teaspoon Mixed Spice 10 Eggs

2 Tablespoons Treacle 1 (or 2) Glass whiskey or ½ Sherry and ½ Whiskey

1 lb Currants

INSTRUCTIONS

Soak the fruit in booze overnight.

Cream together the flour and sugar and eggs one at a time, and slowly add the flour. Add the mixed spice, nutmeg, peel and almonds.

Strain the soaked fruit (keep the boozy fruit juice!) and stir it into the cake batter, and finally add the lemon juice and the reserved boozy fruit juice.

Line a 11” cake tin with brown paper and cook in your gas oven at regulo 1 (140˚C) for 6 hours.

Remove from the oven, leave to cool, save in a tupperware and enjoy!