Incident of the Christmas pudding

Within the first pages of Oscar and Lucinda we are informed “There would have been no church at Gleniffer if it had not been for a Christmas pudding.”

It is this foodstuff – both foreign and familiar to me like so much of Peter Carey’s evocations – that sets the starting mark for Oscar’s path and jumpstarts the narrative of this story. When the book opens Oscar is a 14-year-old boy living in England with his father Theophilus Hopkins, a widower, Plymouth Brethren preacher and amateur naturalist. Oscar is devout and so far unquestioning of his faith and his father.

That is, until the incident of the Christmas pudding. So simple a pleasure — from the description of ingredients its hard to believe that such a homey delight could change the course of a boy’s life:

This was not a normal Christmas pudding. It was a very small one, no bigger than a tennis ball. It contained two teaspoons of glacé cherries, three dessertspoons of raisins, the peel of one orange and the juice thereof, half a cup of flour, half a cup of suet, a splash of brandy, and, apart from the size, you would not think it was such an abnormality…

The scheme to present Oscar with a Christmas pudding did not lie with the boy or his father, but rather a maid new to the household.  An Anglican unlike her evangelical employer, freckle-faced Fanny Drabble is appalled to hear her young master has never tasted a Christmas pudding and intends to right this garrish injustice. Behind Theophilus’ back she makes the small pudding for the Oscar and shuttles the boy off into the kitchen to give him his first taste of the custard-covered, steamed dessert. However, two blissful bites into Oscar’s innocent revelry his fervent father discovers the secret pudding rendezvous and quickly dispatches a blow to the back of Oscar’s head and the pudding straight into the fire.

Theophilus calls it the fruit of Satan, but Oscar, for the first time, does not see eye-to-eye with his father:

The taste in his mouth was vomit, but what he remembered was plums, raisins, cherries, suet, custard made from yellow-yolked eggs and creamy milk. This was not the fruit of Satan. It was not the flesh of which idols eat.

Oscar, angry at his father’s cruel reaction and finding himself unable to accept his father’s belief in the evil of such a delight, prays for a sign from God to tell him whether his father is wrong.

“Dear God,” he said, and the straight edge of his teeth showed, “if it be Thy will that Thy people eat pudding, smite him!

And with that, Theophilus is injured while collecting nature samples in the ocean and Oscar has his answer: he must seek out a different relationship to religion, and despite a feeling of dread the devout young boy soon disavows his father’s religion in favor of traditional Anglicism, with a specific belief in God’s presence in “chance,” thus foreshadowing his later weakness for games of such.

And all of this because of tiny Christmas pudding.

“I look at my crammed shelves and feast with artful reflection, for no meal is good that cannot be reflected upon with pleasure.”

- MFK Fisher, “L is for Literature,” An Alphabet for Gourmets

I believe any “foodie” who has read the works of MFK Fisher considers her some sort of kindred spirit because of what she says about food. I can’t say I’m immune. But, what I truly love about her is how she says it. The reverence for the joy of eating, the beauty of her revelations, and the ultimate respect for the power and playfulness of the written word continue to astound me.

“Given the fact that almost every gastronomer has some kind of literary predilection, it is amusing and interesting to speculate on the whys and whens of such a love.”

My mouth waters at my own feast of literature and library of food on my bookshelves – or stacked in odd corners, stashed on the bed-table, hiding on top of the fridge, bouncing around my handbag or sadly stored away in boxes. All are memories of or hints at the little pieces of solitary joy the greedy, voracious reader – or the equally indulgent gastronome – is intimately familiar with . Yet food, and its literature, is often best when shared.

“Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.”

Sharing food, or words, is all about possibility. Possibility of knowing yourself or others better, of approaching new ideas or perspectives, of long journeys not yet imagined, of tastes not yet tasted, of dinners not yet attended or, sometimes,  just circumstances you can’t expect.  And, naturallijk, all the little pleasures and heartbreaks that come inbetween. I can have a light meal, light read or a light chat, but that spark that happens in great literature, great food, great conversation or great writing about any of those — that — I can never take lightly.

(04/14/11 – while I figure out wtf I’m doing here, you can see wtf I’m trying to figure out over at entropicalia.wordpress.com)