Festive

Anyone of dual or more heritages will recognise this – the clash of your familial customs with the festive traditions of the home country. Growing up in Liverpool with a Hungarian father meant we didn’t quite follow the script laid down by others. It was only after I started school that I discovered other families didn’t open their presents on Christmas Eve, nor did they wait til the very last Sunday before Christmas to put up a tree or decorate the house. But we did.

My father loved Christmas. He had a special cassette tape that he put together with Christmas songs, way before Now That’s What I Call Christmas came along. It was a mix of Hungarian children’s choirs singing traditional carols, Caruso’s Ave Maria, Gigli’s Adeste Fideles and a whole heap of 1950s classics such as I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, Judy Garland’s Have Yourself a Merry Christmas and Nat King Cole’s velvet toned O Come All Ye Faithful. The tape went on as we decorated the tree and pretty much stayed on repeat until New Year. We lived in an old Victorian house with high ceilings, so the Christmas tree was always a huge 15 footer. Dad would balance precariously on a wooden step ladder, stringing ancient fairy lights, and we would learn some new swear words. We had to wait until the lights were working before we could start piling on the ornaments. They were treasured and battered in equal measure. Spun glass birds from Venice, hand made felt gnomes from Austria, delicate blown baubles that shattered if you looked at them sideways, misshapen blobs that each of my sisters and I had made at various nurseries, and lots and lots of chocolates and gingerbreads sent by our German relatives. Scraggly tinsel, getting balder each year, was draped haphazardly. This was always on the last Sunday afternoon before Christmas Day itself. And Dad was impervious to requests for the tree to go up any earlier, citing that when he was a little boy, the tree didn’t go up until Christmas Eve. The tape would go on and then we would have afternoon tea, with one of the (many) Christmas cakes that lived in the cellar freezer.

I need to explain this. There is a bakery in Texas, The Collin Street Bakery, which makes and ships pecan covered Christmas cakes, made to an old German recipe. I’m not entirely sure how Dad stumbled upon them, but in the days way before the internet or even the fax existed, he ordered one of these cakes to be sent to Liverpool. It duly arrived. Then another one. Then another 8. The postman stopped finding it funny, hauling the best part of a kilo cake every day to our door. Expensive transatlantic calls were made. No, they hadn’t made a mistake, they’d sent the order as requested, a Texan Pecan Christmas Fruitcake. Dad pointed out we had 10 of them so far. The bakery said “whoops, ah well, give them to your friends.” A further 6 cakes arrived. More phone calls. Finally they stopped shipping cakes, when we had a total of 20 tins piled up in the kitchen. Cakes were given out to friends. Each cake was enough for 20 people. That’s a lot of cake. Even handing them out to random people left us with about 8 years worth of cake in the chest freezer.

Anyway, back to the traditions. Christmas Eve was non negotiable. It was more important than Christmas Day. The dining room table would be cleared of Dad’s filing system (I’ve mentioned in other stories how we had 2 dining tables but inevitably we ate crammed round a tiny kitchen table because Dad co-opted any horizontal space as a desk), it was the one time of year we actually used the dining room. A fire was lit, the silver came out and the “best” china. At 5pm Dad would start on the blinis. We had blinis with sour cream and smoked salmon, black pepper and lemon for Christmas Eve supper. Dad would scour Liverpool for fresh yeast, and make a huge batch of batter. It would be set to rise, covered with a tea towel, filling the air with a beery scent as it expanded. Dad was finicky about the smoked salmon, buying whole unsliced sides direct from Scotland. He would slice it lengthways into pale pink ribbons that were almost translucent. Sour cream came from Longley Farm and was gently warmed in the oven. The cast iron blini pan was deployed, my sister claimed it and still uses it herself to make Christmas Eve blinis. Tremendous amounts of butter was clarified, and then used to cook the blinis. They sat quietly, covered in a warm oven, whilst the next part of the evening feast was prepared. Wine soup.

Yes. You read that right. Irrespective of the fact that 3 of the diners were children, Dad made Borsleves wine soup, using a whole bottle of Riesling, water, sugar, cinnamon, cloves and thickened with eggs. Lemon zest and nutmeg to finish. If you fancy having a go – the recipe is below. Borsleves is an old fashioned Hungarian Christmas specialty, something Dad remembered from his childhood. As a Catholic country, Christmas Eve was traditionally a fast day, so no meat was served. Nowadays a Halászlé or spicy fish soup, rich with paprika would be more common. But we had wine soup and smoked salmon blinis, firelight and candles sending twinkling light across the glassware and china. The tape would be on, music flowing through the house. Dessert was a silver platter piled with glacé fruits – greengages, pineapples, oranges, cherries; all selected with care and glowing with colour and crystallised sugar. And so to the best bit, presents!

Borsleves

750ml white wine – ideally a riesling or gewürztraminer

325 ml water

1 lemon, thinly zested and the juice

2 cinnamon sticks

4 cloves

150g sugar

6 egg yolks

200ml sour cream

Nutmeg

1. Pour the wine into a saucepan, then add the water, the lemon juice, cinnamon, and cloves. Bring to a boil, allow to simmer for 2 minutes to take the edge off the alcohol but don’t let it cook too long.
2. Whilst the wine is heating, put the egg yolks with the caster sugar into a double boiler if you have one, or use a large bowl that you can suspend over a pan of boiling water. Whisk the sugar and eggs until really fluffy and creamy. Mix in the sour cream.
3. Once the wine mix has simmered, take it off the heat and strain it through a sieve into a jug. Place the cream and yolk mixture over the boiling water, and madly whisking to avoid curdling, carefully pour the wine into it in a thin trickle. Heat the soup on a low setting and keep stirring until it thickens a little. It should be like double cream.
4. Sieve again to remove any cooked egg bits and pour into warmed soup bowls. Garnish each bowl with thin strips of lemon and a rasp of nutmeg.
   

Don’t drive afterwards.