ENGLISH MUM: never knowingly undercatered

So J’s on nights at the moment. We love this as it gives us the opportunity to have random nocturnal chats about all sorts of things while she’s on her break in the bowels of wherever it is she works (she does something incredibly clever and technical which I don’t honestly understand). Hubby came in last night very late to find us gabbing away about the kitsch retro food of Fanny Cradock. Remember her?

This brought me neatly along to the subject of Boxing Day (St Stephen’s Day over here) at Grandma Maudie and Grandad Sam’s house, when four hundred or so of our closest family members squished together in Grandma’s ‘parlour’ to be treated to a Boxing Day feast of epic proportions. I was one of the youngest and therefore was allowed to sit in front of the evil electric fire, which would strip the skin off a bare young calf in a matter of seconds, but she had this fab furry rug, so it was plum position, third degree burns or no. Grandad Sam would have been put to work peeling several hundredweight of new potatoes, ready to be turned into potato salad (with salad cream, not mayo - and covered in snipped chives). When not rushing up and down getting drinks, taking coats, giving cuddles, mending broken toys, playing snap, or any other of millions of uses that every good Grandad has, he used to have a swift swig of whisky in a very comical Monty Python type way while Grandma was in the kitchen, giving us a conspiratorial wink as he hid the bottle again. We laughed like drains.

The grand opening of this gargantuan spread would always be prawn cocktails: forever an eye-watering shade of Barbie pink (J fears that the dreaded crushed beetle may have come into play here) with added chopped tomato on a bed of lettuce, served in Grandma’s best posh glass bowls. I hate prawns but somehow could woof down several of these delights. Other wonders on the heaving table would be sausage rolls, glistening slices of ham, pickled onions, pickled walnuts (ew), Piccalilli (double ew), thinly sliced circles of cucumber (no skin: Grandma Maudie would rather have impaled herself on a sharp implement than served cucumber with skin on), and half of a mystery fruit (melon?) covered in foil and then randomly stabbed with cocktail sticks containing tiny sausages, squares of cheese and baby silverskin onions, or cheese and pineapple, or cheese and cheese. All were the height of yumminess. I also loved the hard-boiled eggs which she used to halve, remove the yolk, mix with salad cream and pipe back into the whites. Fantastic. Ooh and what about the celery sticks cut into 2 inch lengths and piped with cream cheese before being sprinkled with something pink (paprika??). I must talk to me Mam about this because she’s bound to remember loads of other bits.

Puddings were wobbly jellies containing floating fruit pieces, (and squirty cream!!) and, oh…the rabbit mould containing Crème Caramel which was turned out with a flourish to provide a glistening brown edible bunny. Wrong on so many different levels, but oddly nice. There were cakes and chocolate swiss rolls and ice cream floaters, meringue nests filled with cream and topped with enough (tinned) fruit to make Carmen Miranda feel slightly bare, and then while we could still just about waddle to the kitchen, we’d be allowed to make Snowballs.

I’m misty eyed and nostalgic about Snowballs. So much so that Hubby bought me a bottle of Advocaat on our recent trip to the North and I’m going to get the kids to make them. Snowballs, if you didn’t know, are in my family the only form of alcohol widely accepted to contain no actual alcohol and therefore permissible for small children on that one night of the year. They’re actually very simple (slosh some Advocaat in a glass, top up with lemonade), but with Grandma Maudie at the helm they took several wonderful hours of careful mixing and blending with her handheld plastic whisk to get just the right level of frothy topping, then to choose the perfect complementary colour of plastic cocktail stick, and the roundest, pinkest cocktail cherry to nestle in the top. No wonder I have a serious cocktail addiction. Ahhh, all our Christmas yesterdays, eh?