Basic Christmas menu not changed much, says caterer
By Nils Campbell
Stabroek News
December 25, 2004
The cooking methods for Christmas meals have gone through various changes, even though the basic menu remains the same, says manageress of the Sit and Snack Snackette and Catering Service, Mrs Janice Dundas.
Dundas has been catering for all levels of the society over the last ten years or so, but she looks back with nostalgia to the Christmas seasons she enjoyed as a girl on the Essequibo Coast. "I suppose watching my mother cook such wonderful dishes... must have helped to create in me the desire to cook, to aim to cook the best, and to see persons eat to their satisfaction," she says.
"When I was a child there were some things that appeared on the Christmas breakfast table automatically. Pepperpot, garlic pork and ham ranked high among the seasonal foods to which we looked forward. Today, however, things like pepperpot form part of the regular diet...
"Baked chicken, for example, was almost unheard of except during the Christmas period. There were so many positives that contributed to enhancing the Christmas spirit in those days, but today it seems as if the emphasis is more-or-less on eating and drinking."
Dundas cannot forget her mother patiently preparing the earthen oven made out of a particular texture of mud and cow dung, and perhaps with a sprinkling of sand added. Coconut shells and other heat-producing materials provided the energy source.
Her mother would carefully light the fire, remove the hot coals from the oven, and then use a soaked jute bag to preserve the heat after putting in a cake, chicken or what have you to be baked for hours. "I never ceased to be amazed over the special skills she and persons her age possessed to time the operation with such correctness," she says; "Whenever they decided that the pie was baked they were always perfectly right."
Black cake which is still considered by some as the most difficult cake to bake, used to come out near perfect. "You bet it was baked in the earthen oven in the countryside," Dundas says..
Now that she is a caterer she has one regret. She was deprived of the experience of preparing meals in the type of oven her parents used, because they switched to an Aga brand European iron stove that used wood when her time came to learn to cook.
Nevertheless, she delights in the fact that, "My love for cooking developed from my girlhood days; my mother loved to experiment, and I watched, tasted and learnt." She feels the one area of Christmas food preparation which has been revolutionized is the cooking means - gas stoves instead of the oval-shaped box or earthen oven. However, she adds, the menu has become more vared as well.
In the countryside the Christmas meal used to consist of rice - and in those days it was either plain, fried or cook-up rice - pepperpot, ham, chicken, roast pork, and ground provisions.
"The basic menu has not changed very much in that rice and meat were the dominant items. Today, however, we have various ways to prepare rice. We have the Rice Essequibo, Rice Demerara, Spanish rice, vegetable rice, and yellow rice."
In the old days, according to Dundas, ham used to be imported and for weeks after purchase it would be left hanging in the kitchen in a black wrapper. "Perhaps our parents used to leave it there to tempt us. However, it all helped to tell the story that Christmas was nearby."
Of the home-made drinks from yesteryear she remembers several, with falernum being one of the more popular ones. This she recalls was made from lemon juice, and her mother would add egg white and high wine along with a sugar sling and allow it to set over a 21-day period.
"It becomes as clear as a rice wine," Dundas explains, and was very tasty. Tangerine liqueur, sorrel drink, ginger beer, mango fly and potato fly were among the others. "Today, people tend to go for the more exotic drinks imported in bottles, thus ignoring local products and local recipes that often could be more tasty and nutritious.
"Example, the general trend is for persons to prepare salad from imported potatoes, and my guests are always happy when I produce one from sweet potatoes, reinforced with brown sugar and other local produce which we call candy sweet potatoes."