Whispering death, Scooby Doo, a balsa wood barge and lebkuchen
Abundance: Wednesday 20 December 2023
There is a day on which everyone discovers their dad is a nutter.
Mine came aged 11, midsummer, at a friend’s house. Two hours playing cricket in the farmyard - a milk churn for the wicket, my friend England, me the West Indies - came to a close when the midday sun sent us indoors for cheese sandwiches and cold pop. On the kitchen table, a jar of piccalilli.
‘Left over from Christmas?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘The piccalilli…left over from Christmas?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Piccalilli…it’s a Christmas thing!” I scoffed.
‘What are you talking about!’
This was the first crack in a facade that quickly spread - as if in a Scooby Doo earthquake - into the widest of canyons.
It became apparent that - rather than it being a convention upheld by the rest of civilisation - it was only my old man who considered walnuts, Turkish Delight, Ritz biscuits, After Eights, ginger cordial, dates and piccalilli just for Christmas.
Further festive madnesses walked out of the childhood mist: I’ve no idea why he bought a balsam wood barge of dates when neither he nor I (nor the cat) liked them. A bottle of Mateus rosé - looking (and indeed tasting) as if it had spent centuries lost at sea before washing up on our doorstep - opened with Christmas lunch, a small glass taken, the rest ignored for weeks before vanishing without warning or ceremony. Ginger cordial, the colour of caramel, he drank neat; a sippable inch in a glass as if it were a single malt - I did the same, assuming that’s how it was. He lifted After Eights from their dark green box, replacing the envelope in a serial killer move that gave the impression to his young son that there were still many left to eat. It was like reaching for a favourite record and finding no vinyl inside.
As a kid, there were only three spices in the house: white pepper1, ragingly hot dried chillis, and a short jar of mixed spice that arrived soon after the first supermarket opened and sat unused - warm spices in a cold larder - after my mum left.
The old man was born in Sri Lanka and spent his first 13 years living in the sun; a life of warm winds, luscious fruit and glinting seas. I’m not sure he ever got over leaving. He wasn’t such a cook. His curries were - with the occasional leftover chicken or Boxing Day turkey variation - cheap mince and onions fried without mercy in a generous berg of lard lifted from the chip pan with the point of The Sharp Knife, spiced only with white pepper and an assault of dried chillis kept in an old Nescafe jar. Even from my bedroom, I could pick up the moment the white pepper was deployed: no air rises quicker than that peppered air rose from the pan up the stairs and - somehow - through my closed bedroom door. Even now, few smells make me as hungry as white pepper hitting hot fat.
Christmases now are still very much about spices, only - thankfully - more of them than the three of my childhood. Cloves in the bread sauce, star anise in the mulled cider, nutmeg on the roast potatoes (if you don’t, you should), nutmeg on the sprouts (if you don’t, you should), warming spices in mince pies and Christmas pudding etc etc.
Every December, I make Lebkuchengewuerz - a classic German spice blend - and for this year’s batch I’m using the last stick of a batch of cinnamon - a gift from a lovely person - grown on the island she was visiting: Sri Lanka, home of cinnamon and the old man. And a few white peppercorns that, surprisingly, make it even better.
Lebkuchengewuerz
This German gingerbread spice blend on or in anything makes the house of Christmas: if you do nothing but keep it in a jar to inhale once a day, life will be improved. A three fingered pinch over rice pudding, dusted over hot chocolate or when making gingerbread will see you very right.
This is heavier on the mace and cardamom than I often go for: for reasons unknown it is just what I feel like this year. I love how the spices reveal themselves independently, the cloves first and lastly the mace heading to the shops when you’re coming back with the change.
6cm cinnamon stick
10 cloves
10 allspice
2 skeleton of mace
seeds from 16 cardamom pods
½ tsp ginger
4 white peppercorns (optional)
1 tsp anise seed (or fennel if you have no anise)
Place all in a coffee/spice grinder or a mortar and pestle and reduce to a fine-ish powder.
Lebkuchen
These German festive biscuits are easy and special, and while they cook and cool the house will be perfumed with the scent of Christmas. For the gluten intolerant, you can use GF plain flour or a mix of oat flour and ground almonds; the icing sugar and cocoa are untraditional and non-essential but I like them nevertheless.
Whatever you do, don’t over-cook lebkuchen: their texture should be somewhere between firm and not, and too much heat makes them less satisfying.
Rather than irritate myself with the faff of using a cookie cutter, I’ve taken to rolling up the mix into a couple of 5cm fat sausages, wrapping each in greaseproof and freezing them to slice into 1cm thick coins and cook from frozen when I fancy: they form low, wide drumlins of just the right dimensions to encourage the ideal mix of soft to crunch.
Makes approx 30
450g plain flour
2 tbsp Lebkuchengewürz (see above)
3 good pinches of salt
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
170g dark soft brown sugar
150ml honey
60g unsalted butter, softened
Finely grated zest of 1 lemon
2 large eggs
A little icing sugar
A little cocoa
Pour the honey and butter into a small pan and warm over a low heat, stirring to combine.
Briefly whisk the eggs in cup. Put the remaining ingredients in a bowl and stir in the honey butter. Slowly add the eggs and stir in: a tacky dough should come together.
At this point, either roll into sausages, freeze, and cut fat draughts to cook when you fancy them (as described above), or proceed as below.
Cover the bowl with a damp tea towel and place in the fridge for one hour.
Lightly dust the work surface, and roll the dough out to around 7-8mm thick. Use a cookie cutter to make biscuits of whatever shape you favour.
When you are almost ready to cook, preheat the oven to 180°C fan/160°C otherwise.
Place baking paper on 2 or 3 baking sheets.
Lay the cut biscuit dough on the baking trays and cook in the centre of the oven for around 12 minutes, until very slightly risen: catch them before they darken too much. Cool on a wire rack before dusting with icing sugar and cocoa.
They will store for 4-5 days in an airtight container.
There was a weekend somewhere in the late 70s weekend when everything changed: pasta and duvets came to Britain, and everyone swapped from white to black pepper
The After Eight serial killer comment made me guffaw out loud 😆 This American has fond memories of using those wrappers to make Barbie LPs in the 80s. I too have a stash of Sri Lankan cinnamon, that I've been afraid to use up. These seem like the perfect send off for it. Cheers from across the sea
Confession: We used to replace After Eight sleeves to wind my Mum up. Very dangerous game at Christmas. She also use to refer to duvets as continental quilts when we first got them but she was a champion tucker inner.