From Tinteán‘s Go-To Chef, Imelda Murphy
Happy Festive Season !
Christmas with the In-Laws
When we married, there was no discussion about where we would spend Christmas Day, at my husband’s house in Phibsboro, Dublin. That was fine by me, as my mother-in-law was a great cook.
I don’t recall cooking a Christmas lunch in our first few years following our arrival in Adelaide. I imagine I bought pre-cooked and sliced turkey and ham in David Jones’ food hall in Rundle Mall. We were, after all, a small family now, two adults and a baby.
My in-laws came to visit for Christmas from Dublin around five years after we had arrived in Adelaide. My husband was determined that we cook a proper Christmas lunch with all the trimmings to impress his parents. No Christmas on the beach for us, ‘new Australians’.
We bought a recipe book and an uncooked turkey that year. We were looking forward to a traditional Christmas lunch ourselves: my husband carving the turkey (with our new electic knife), proudly holding aloft the ‘Pope’s nose’, and somewhat coyly offering ‘breast or thigh’. And to top it off there was his mother’s ‘bread stuffing’, that my husband remembered how to make. He had ‘made it’, in this new country.
All went well on the day.
The next morning I made breakfast: bacon and eggs (we called them ‘rashers’ when we first arrived and later ‘sliced rashers’). To keep the food warm I had turned on the oven. Opening the oven with a plate of cooked bacon in my hand, I saw a puzzling sight. The leftover turkey in the oven was ‘moving’ under a covering of white worms. This was before we had air conditioning, just fans in the bedrooms. At my gasp, my husband came to see what was up.
We were both looking at the strange sight when we heard stirrings from our guests’ bedroom. Aghast, he scurried around for paper and plastic bags to gather up and hide the disaster, while I swept up the wriggling mass that had tumbled on to the kitchen floor on its way to the kitchen bin. The bin contents tossed into the outside refuse bin and then hurridly washed and dried, we finally greeted my in-laws as they arrived into the kitchen some ten minutes later, as though it had been a calm and ordinary start to the day.
After breakfast out on the patio, we took the in-laws for another Australian experience, down to Moana in the Kingswood where you could park your car on the beach. They were highly amused at this liberal approach parking, remembering their summers on Tramore Beach in Waterford. We picked up takeaway on the way home and that put paid to any possible suggestion of using up ‘leftover turkey’. All in all our first Christmas in Australia with my in-laws was a success. But the following year it was back to David Jones’ food hall on Christmas Eve, buying just enough cooked turkey to last one day.
Dymphna Lonergan
Cold, and Fruit? Sacré Bleu
My family’s Christmas dinners for a decade or so have been what we call a gathering of ‘Orphans’, people who are remote from their families. The core drivers are an Irish-identified woman (first generation) and an African who studied in Dublin, and we all invited people who fitted the very loose definition of ‘orphan’. Problems arose with the very casualness of the invitation. Often, not knowing the host, they would be shy and not turn up, often without notice. Sadly. Sometimes the menu would be meticulously crafted and sometimes people would arrive with unexpected offerings in quantities that weren’t anticipated. In the heat, fridges laboured under the strain.
One Christmas, I rebelled. A bit bored by the predictability of ham and turkey with fancy stuffing and roast veggies (we’re all but vegetarian). One year, when I was hosting, I decided my contribution should be cold: turkey breast cooked a day or so ahead, cooled and mixed into a hollandaise sauce with finely chopped celery and carrot, and the pièce de résistance, stoned cherries and seeded watermelon cubes (in the sauce), plus exotic salads, followed by plum pudding icecream. The main course was a labour of love, requiring a new (double) cherry seeder and a great deal of patience and finding space in the fridge, overstuffed for the season. To me, it looked festive with its glossy cherries and a crisp watermelon. I thought no one in their right mind, sweltering indoors with the air-con on full-blast, would demur. Indeed, I hoped they’d find it a daring adaptation to the hot season.
I can’t have communicated my intentions very well, and did not anticipate the tenacity of these imported traditions. Their link to cherished pasts. I completely underestimated how discombobulated my fellow-Orphans would be with this break in European Christmas traditions, their disappointment, and how very weird they thought it was to combine turkey with dessert fruit. I don’t think they’ve recovered from the shock to this day. Though, it did pave the way in our spread for African food, spicy and capsicum rich, and for variations on Jollif Rice.
And I continue to hanker for a cold Christmas spread that isn’t prawns.
Frances Devlin-Glass
A Cold Coming We Had Of It…
It was my first Christmas in the northern hemisphere and everything made sense. The songs made sense, ‘The weather outside is frightful…’ The icicle decorations made sense and the traditional Christmas fare of
seasonal vegetables and warming comfort food made sense. I was living in Dublin and went to my friend Joan’s house for Christmas dinner. All of the family were there and Joan had prepared a feast. There was roast turkey and pork, potatoes done three different ways, turnip, swede and the mandatory Brussel sprouts that had been simmering away for hours.
I was asked if I was missing my family in Australia and the barby on the beach. It wasn’t the first time I had been asked this and I wondered why it was assumed that every family in Australia was barbecuing prawns on the beach on Christmas day. Some years later, I realised that it was probably soap operas like ‘Home and Away’ that informed ideas about Australians.
Just before lunch, Joan decided it was time to whip up the Christmas pudding. I’ve made a few Christmas puddings in my time, some months before, some weeks before, some even days before Christmas day, but never hours before it was to be served. Joan found a recipe in a magazine. It had all of the usual ingredients and it also called for some Guinness and what seemed like an inordinate amount of breadcrumbs. She mixed it all together and placed it in the microwave to cook. Yes, the microwave. No lucky sixpence or threepence went into the pudding, but in hindsight if they had made it in, and the microwave had blown up, that would have been a better outcome. Even the whiskey custard couldn’t save the pudding.
I spent the rest of the afternoon lying down with a belly ache. It was either the aftermath or the pudding or excess fun and laughter. I’ll go with the latter.
Linda Rooney
Navigating Christmas in the Sub-Tropics
Admittedly it was not included in the marriage promises, but I had naively believed the myriad stories of dwelling by lashing waves on silver sands, with lawns of verdant grass stretching down to the seafront with tropical fruits aplenty. So here I was, my first Christmas in Australia. 1959, and I was five months pregnant. We rented a flatette in Norman Park, near the New Farm Ferry on the Brisbane River. It did have a river frontage but no flyscreens and no aircon. At night mosquitoes as big as helicopters vied with flying cockroaches for my blood, and sanity.
On Christmas Eve I shopped at The Valley. I bought a ‘chook’ instead of turkey. Going home and boarding the ferry to cross the river, it became evident that the Ferryman’s Christmas had started at an early hour. In answer to frantic screaming of some passengers, two male passengers had to take control and, following a series of collisions with the jetty, safely docked.
I doubt the Christmas meal was a momentous culinary achievement. All I remember was that the already oppressive temperature had risen beyond endurance in the kitchen. With difficulty I squeezed my expanding body into my petite swimsuit. The singular swimsuit had become the plural ‘bathers’ in the new vernacular. Is that a genius Ozzie recognition of what happens when a swimsuit accommodates more than one person?
I trod carefully through the sun-scorched prickly earth to the rocks at the end of the garden, and plunged into the cooling water. It was bliss. I tested the river currents and they were manageable so I turned on my back and allowed the cooling water to flow over me. I heard people calling out from gardens on the banks of the river but could not understand what they were saying. I put it down to the festive spirit and yelled back ‘Happy Christmas’. Such friendly people.
As I emerged from the water a woman next door called out from her garden to tell me that four sharks were sighted close by in the river before I entered the water. It was hard to believe that sharks came that far up the river. Perhaps, with my expanding body, they thought I was one of them.
Renee Huish
A Christmas-Day Dip in Ireland
In December 1978, on our first visit to Ireland, found ourselves in a B&B in Recess, County Galway.
On Christmas morning, our hostess insisted that we vacate the premises whilst she prepared Christmas Dinner. Another guest, a young American actor who had come to audition for the Abbey, tagged along. She was downcast, flabbergasted not to have got the gig.
Our host directed us to Mannin Bay. The sea was blue and the sky cloudless, so I stripped off and went for a swim. Wasn’t it my obligation as an Australian to have a dip on Christmas Day?
The water was of course FREEZING, and my ‘swim’, exhilarating though it was, lasted less than two minutes. No matter: within a couple of hours I was the notoriety of the day in Recess (population 50?). So famous did I become that the American confessed she wished she had joined me.
I paid the price for my hubris: pneumonia.
Bob Glass
Tinteán 