December 2020

Reader, do you like Christmas pudding? Or do you find that a lump of suet and breadcrumbs smothered in sauce feels a bit heavy after a roast bird stuffed with more breadcrumbs? If you do go for the entire traditional menu, do you make the pudding yourself or do you buy one of the excellent ready-made ones on offer these days?

During my childhood in Cape Town, my family celebrated Christmas in the traditional Victorian English way, even though the seasons were reversed, Christmas fell at midsummer, and a salad on the beach would have been more appropriate than roast turkey and Christmas pudding. I was a child before many of our modern conveniences came onto the market, and the process of preparing the ritual meal took a lot of time and effort. Yet somehow in retrospect it seems a lot more satisfying than making lists of things to buy and put in the freezer months in advance of the Big Day. Perhaps it was because the whole family worked together to do it.

The turkey came from one of my father’s work colleagues, who kept poultry. Usually it arrived dead and plucked, though not gutted, but one year my father had to take it outside and do the dreadful deed himself, away from his (possibly) tender-hearted children. The insides were always interesting, as my mother, a zoologist, took the opportunity to give us an anatomy lesson along with the cookery lesson. They were made into soup, except the liver, which went into the stuffing. One year the turkey was full of little half-formed eggs, which also went to enrich the stuffing. There was no plastic wrapping to dispose of, only feathers.

I particularly remember helping my mother to make Christmas puddings using Mrs Beeton’s recipe. She always made extra ones as presents for friends and family.  It seems a bit daft in retrospect to make English puddings in Africa and then post them to England, where my grandparents lived. It was quite a lot of work. We had to prepare all the pounds of currants, raisins and sultanas ourselves, picking off stalks, de-stoning raisins, and washing the fruit, because in those days dried fruit didn’t come ready-prepared. We had to blanch the almonds in boiling water and rub off the brown skins and then split them into flakes. My brother and I liked helping our mother do these jobs because it meant we got to eat quite a lot of the fruit and nuts as we went, especially the almonds. What I didn’t like was helping to make the breadcrumbs. Stale bread had to be rubbed through a wire sieve, because those were the days before electric grinders and choppers. This was boring and took hours, and I was always scraping my knuckles painfully against the wire sieve.

When the mass of fruit and batter was finally ready to be mixed, all the family had to take a ritual stir with a wooden spoon – again, no electric food mixer – and make a wish, which had to be kept secret or it wouldn’t come true. We all knew that we were not supposed to believe in magic wishes, just as we knew that Father Christmas was really our own father filling our stockings, but somehow it didn’t matter. It was part of the special family happiness of Christmas. 

This year, due to the covid pandemic, I shall not be celebrating Christmas in the same house as my family for the first time in seventy years, but the happiness of those childhood Christmases remains with me always.

The small islands of Colonsay and Oronsay lie close together in the Inner Hebrides. On both of them shell middens have been found, great heaps largely consisting of shells left by the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived there just after the end of the last ice age. The majority of the shells were limpets. Limpets pop up all over the Western and Northern isles, not just on Mesolithic sites, but on sites of all ages, such as the middens at the Iron Age site at Munkerhoose on Papa Westray.

The general opinion seems to be that limpets are tough and rubbery and best used for fishing bait, after being soaked in water for a long time. Humans mostly ate them in the historical past as famine food, so probably the same applied in the prehistoric past.  According to the archaeologist Professor Paul Mellars, limpets don’t taste very good but have greater nutritional value than winkles and whelks and are easier to get out of their shells. They are therefore an efficient energy source.

However, there are people who take a more enthusiastic view. I have just come across a recipe in a book of traditional Scottish cooking for limpet ‘stovies'. The limpets are removed from their shells and added to potatoes for slow cooking in a very little liquid in a sealed pot. It originates from the island of Colonsay. (“The Scots Kitchen, its traditions and recipes”, F. Marian McNeill, edited and introduced by Catherine Brown 2010, pages 142-3).

There is a footnote on page 142 of this cookbook quoting André Simon, a French-born wine merchant, gourmet and writer, to the effect that limpets can be as good as or better than oysters in many dishes. If you Google limpet recipes, you get a lot of them, especially from Spain and Portugal. They call them ‘lapas’. Grilled with garlic butter seems to be the most popular, although fried or boiled or added to rice also feature. A village on the island of Madeira even has a limpet festival in mid-July: the limpets are grilled with garlic butter and lemon. Most of these recipes cook them in their shells. It is admitted that they are a little chewy. They are accompanied by beer or white wine – a long way from famine food.

Some caution is required with all shellfish as they are liable to contamination by various things, so don’t just rush out with a hammer and start knocking them off the rocks. But perhaps we could persuade our local sources of winkles and oysters to get us a few limpets for a change?