20 
In which Mr Oldknow dreams of making an Empire plum pudding (24 December 1850) and Bridget Jones attends Una Alconbury’s New Year’s Day Turkey Curry Buffet Lunch (1 January 1996)
How Christmas fare took the Empire into British homes
On Christmas Eve 1850, Mr Oldknow sat before the kitchen fire smoking a cigar. He had spent the afternoon ‘romping with his children’ who now ‘at last had gone to bed with flushed faces and disordered curls’. He followed his wife into the kitchen, where she read him the recipe for ‘A Pound Christmas Pudding’ from the family receipt book and showed him the ‘rich, semi-liquefied mass, speckled with plums and currants’ sitting in a ‘vast earthen pan’ waiting to be spooned into pudding cloths ‘at the peep of dawn’ the next morning. He was tempted to sit a while in the warmth and muse while his wife went off to bed. A keen armchair traveller, as he gazed upon the ‘vast pudding dish’ his thoughts turned to ‘the mercantile history of the various substances of which th[e] pudding was composed’. Worn out ‘after all the polking and blind man’s buff’ he fell into a doze and in his dreams the smoke from his cigar took on the form of a succession of ghostly figures, each one bearing the ingredients to make a plum pudding.1
The first figure to appear in Mr Oldknow’s kitchen was the Genius of the Raisin from the sun-drenched hillsides of Andalusia, who complained that the British arrived at Mediterranean ports ‘every year… with… linens and… woollens… glass and… pottery’ to exchange for dried grapes that would have been better made into wine. Mr Oldknow patiently explained to his disgruntled interlocutor that the availability of ‘the products of our looms and our furnaces’ would encourage industriousness among his people. ‘For we induce a taste for comforts that will become a habit. When our glass and our porcelain shall find its way into your peasant’s hut, then will your olives be better tended and your grapes more carefully dried. Man only worthily labours when he labours for exchange with other labour.’2 Mr Oldknow’s next visitor was, in contrast, a cheerful advocate of free trade. The Greek Genius of the Currant thought it more efficient to grow vines on his native soil where the climate suited them and then exchange currants for wheat, sugar and coffee. ‘Welcome is your Christmas’, he declared, for the laws of supply and demand meant that as long as Englishmen continued to want currants for their plum puddings, Greece would be sure of its bread.3
The currant genie was quickly replaced by the smock-frocked Genius of Bread in a straw hat and laced boots, slow of speech and muttering about ‘Protection’. ‘Who taught you that song?’ asked Mr Oldknow, becoming agitated. ‘Do you want protection against cheap bread… against warm and clean clothing; against a sound roof with glazed windows; against a coal fire; against your tea, your sugar, your butter, your cheese, your bacon, and your Christmas pudding?’ The Corn Laws had been repealed only four years earlier and Mr Oldknow was clearly convinced of the benefits to Britain’s labouring classes of cheap foreign food imports. The Genius of Suet had only a walk-on part, driving a tired ox to its end in Smithfield market, and was quickly replaced by a forest scene from the Banda Islands in the Indian Archipelago and the ‘fantastic figure’ of the Genius of Nutmeg. A strange creature, with the head of a Dutchman on the body of a wood pigeon, he delivered a speech on the shortcomings of his East India Company’s attempts to monopolise the European spice trade. Having observed the thriving British colony of Ceylon, which sold cinnamon to all comers, he claimed to have learned that the ‘end of commerce… is not to make [a few] individuals rich… but to diffuse all the productions of nature and art, amongst all the inhabitants of the globe’.4
It was more difficult to feel triumphant on the appearance of the Genius of Sugar in the guise of a freed West Indian slave who, although he was no longer in chains, had lost the security of an assured home market. ‘The nation that demanded cheap corn would not be content with dear sugar’, he complained, and now bought its annual 700 million lb of sugar from whatever was the cheapest source. Shying away from the complicated politics of slavery and sugar, Mr Oldknow was beguiled by the cloaked figure of the Egg-Collector of Cork, with laughing grey eyes and long black lashes, miraculously recovered from the effects of famine.
Next appeared the gnomic figure of Salt, who berated Mr Oldknow for depriving the Hindoo of fiscal justice, in a reference to the salt tax the British administration imposed on its Indian subjects. The Milky Genius took his place, a combination of a dairymaid and a water nymph. Finally a power-loom weaver ‘stepped forth, with a pudding-cloth in hand. “The water boils,” said he; “the ingredients are mixed. Be it mine to bind them together!”’5 A giant pudding arose out of the bowl and swelled into ‘an enormous globe’ and a Frenchman emerged out of a bunch of holly to pour a flask of brandy over the pudding, announcing, ‘It is the genius of our nation to flare up!’ As the pudding burst into flames, the genii danced around it and Mr Oldknow broke into a song to celebrate Britain’s bringing together of the ‘league of mankind’.6
This was the scene conjured up in a piece entitled ‘A Christmas pudding’ published in Charles Dickens’ periodical Household Words in December 1850. From the late 1830s, specially written Christmas books, short stories and periodical pieces were published every December; in them, the Victorians reinvented Christmas as a cosy celebration of Englishness. Families were portrayed gathered together to overindulge in roast beef and most particularly in plum pudding. Mr Oldknow declared it ‘our England’s annual luxury’.7 Enriched with dried fruit and spices, plum pudding was a version of the plain pudding that had been a favourite with the English since they began boiling dough mixtures in a cloth in the seventeenth century. Although in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was eaten on celebratory occasions throughout the year, Victorian seasonal literature’s persistent association of plum pudding with Christmas meant that over time people began to think of it as Christmas pudding.
As Mr Oldknow’s dream showed, the milk, wheat and beef suet needed to make a plum pudding were home-produced, although, with the repeal of the Corn Laws, an American pioneer farmer could just as well have replaced the Kentish ploughman as the Genius of Bread. However, the sugar, spices and dried fruit that made it special were foreign. The author of The Book of Christmas (1836) personified the plum pudding as a ‘blackamoor who derives his extraction from the spice lands’. He went on to explain that ‘his Oriental properties have, however, received an English education and taken an English form’.8 In the book’s illustrations, the pudding appeared as a portly black man whose rotund figure was clothed in archaic medieval English dress.
One of several Punch cartoons which used a plum pudding to represent the globe. Here Britannia is bountifully offering to share some plum pudding with American Jonathan as a gesture of thanks after the United States discovered and returned the exploration vessel the Resolute, abandoned during a British expedition to the North Pole.
The plum pudding was thought of as ‘a truly national dish’ not in spite of but because of its foreign ingredients.9 These made it into an ‘emblem of our commercial eminence’.10 Punch cartoons showing John Bull poised with his knife and fork over the globe represented as a plum pudding are a powerful illustration of just how central the commercial empire was to the British sense of self.11 To be a Victorian Englishman was to possess the power to eat the world.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the influx of large quantities of tobacco, sugar, tea, spices and calicoes from the Empire meant that all levels of society acquired new tastes and Britain was transformed into a nation of consumers. Ordinary labourers like Nany Latham and her daughters were drawn into the commercial economy, taking up spinning in order to earn the cash to buy gingham dresses, china plates and sugar candy. People from all walks of life–not just the elite–could now be judged by the furnishings in their homes, the pretty ribbon in their hair, the quality of the tea they served their guests. These standards were used to assess the status of others, but in an important psychological shift people also applied them when judging themselves. This change in sensibilities gave rise to a new, recognisably modern sense of self. Thus the Empire played an important part in the creation of the modern capitalist consumer.12
In the Second Empire’s era of free trade, the British saw it as their duty to bring about a similar industrious revolution in the rest of the world. Colonial Americans, from the Carolina rice planter with his fine mahogany dining table to the New England farmer who drank his rum out of a pewter goblet, had already been transformed into enthusiastic consumers in the eighteenth century.13 But central to the ideology of the British civilising mission was the notion that even wayward Pacific islanders and nomadic Aborigines could be brought into the fold of respectable Christian civilisation if they were educated in the delights of British habits such as drinking sugared tea from china cups.
By the mid nineteenth century there could be nothing more British than a cup of sweet tea. And yet the drink was an infusion of a Chinese plant acquired in exchange for opium grown in Bengal. In the early years of its consumption it was drunk out of porcelain imported from China, although potteries in Britain’s industrial heartland had by now begun to make china teapots and cups. The sugar to sweeten it was originally grown by African slaves on West Indian plantations, and was now cultivated by Indian indentured labourers transported around the globe to suit the needs of British capital. There was barely anything at all that was British about a cup of tea, and yet it became a symbol of national identity.
Mr Oldknow reminded the grumbling Genius of Bread that since the repeal of the Corn Laws, his wages went twice as far and now afforded him the basic comforts of life. First on Mr Oldknow’s list of the labourer’s staple foodstuffs were sugar and tea. By the 1850s, these foreign substances were intrinsic to the diet of the British industrial working classes. Sweet tea, and treacle poured on a pudding or spread on a slice of bread, fitted into the constraints of factory life when wages were too low to buy sufficient fuel to keep a pottage simmering over the fire; and a slice of bread and treacle could easily be handed to a hungry child to eat in the street. Even though it was lacking in nutritional value, sugar had been transmuted from an ephemeral luxury into a basic foodstuff. It was no longer a flavouring added to make food more palatable but instead had become an essential source of energy.14 This recategorisation of sugar is one of the Empire’s enduring legacies and has allowed sugar to take its central place within the modern diet.
In the nineteenth century, sugar and tea gave the workman the energy to spin and weave the cotton and forge the steel to make the British manufactures that were used to acquire more colonial foodstuffs.15 Mr Oldknow argued that ‘the artisan of Birmingham and Manchester–the seamen of London and Liverpool–whose festive board will be made joyous, tomorrow, with that national dish [the plum pudding], has contributed by his labour, to make the raisins of Malaga and the currants of Zante–the oranges of Algarve, the cinnamon of Ceylon and the nutmegs of the Moluccas–of commercial value; and he has thus called them into existence as effectually as the labour of the native cultivator’.16
On the early Irish and American plantations the English applied the Tudor conviction that the basis of a stable society was a well-ordered countryside where tenants tilled the soil while living in nuclear villages clustered around a church and a manor house. They felt entitled to appropriate Irish and American land as the indigenous inhabitants were judged unable to realise its full potential. The idea that they were rescuing territory from the wasteful negligence of its original owners continued to be a powerful strand of British imperial ideology. ‘What a settlement one could have in this valley!’ declared the explorer Henry Stanley in 1871 as he gazed out over open country near Lake Tanganyika. ‘Fancy a church spire rising where that tamarind rears its dark crown of foliage, and think how well a score or so of pretty cottages would look instead of those thorn clumps and gum trees! Fancy this lovely valley teeming with herds of cattle and fields of corn, spreading to the right and left of this stream! How much better would such a state become this valley, rather than its wild and deserted aspect.’17
As Britain’s impoverished rural population migrated to the United States and the Empire, they took with them the unshakeable British belief in land as ‘an article to be measured, allocated, traded, and improved’ and spread the notion of transferable, individual property rights across the globe.18 By 1850, the feudal peasantry of Tudor times had disappeared from the countryside and Britain was in the process of acquiring a vast agricultural estate overseas.19 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the reduction in transport costs brought about by railways and steamships, as well as the technological innovations of canning and refrigeration, meant that the white-dominated settler colonies were able to supply the industrial working classes with sufficient quantities of cheap bread and meat to distract them from thoughts of concerted political protest or revolution.
The import of wheat and meat from the settler colonies eradicated starvation among the British industrial population. Nevertheless, the problem of hidden malnutrition remained. The Empire supplied the working classes with enough calories to work hard throughout their short lives but their diminutive stature in comparison to the well-fed middle class revealed the poverty of their diets.20 It was not until the 1930s that the existence of hidden malnutrition–deficiencies in calcium, iron and an array of vitamins–among the majority of Britain’s population was identified.
The other half of Britain’s imperial estate was populated by a non-white tributary peasantry in the tropics, where they grew cocoa, sugar and tea.21 While Mr Oldknow spoke in self-congratulatory terms of encouraging industriousness among Britain’s trading partners, in fact, while Britain had learned its lesson in America and allowed the white settler colonies a measure of self-government and eventually to grow into industrial nations in their own right, the development of manufacturing and industry was discouraged in the non-white world. The tropics were expected to supply Britain with raw materials and in turn to absorb British manufactures. The long-term impact of this policy was to retard the development of these countries. After independence they were trapped in the role of primary producers, often with economies based precariously on one or two products at the mercy of price fluctuations in the world market.
If Empire products helped to maintain social inequality within Britain, in the Empire ecosystems and traditional diets were destroyed by the arrival of the white man. Well-intentioned outreach officers forced ‘proper’ farming techniques on indigenous peasants, leaving them with drought-prone, less nourishing replacement crops; and those who worked for the British as porters, navvies or farm hands were fed the same innutritious industrial ration as the working classes at home, with the same depressing effect that they became malnourished and prone to disease. As remote villagers were drawn into the imperial commercial world, a new type of famine appeared, caused when food shortages led to such severe inflation that the poor were priced out of the market. Unable to afford to buy food, they starved.
Romanticised advertising showing colourfully dressed women picking tea on picturesque Indian hillsides diverted the attention of the metropolitan consumer away from the squalid reality of the labourers’ lives on the plantations. British imperial ideology was caught in a contradiction. While the Empire was based on economic exploitation, Pax Britannica was supposed to bring peace and the impartial rule of British law to the colonies, freeing people from the autocratic decrees of Eastern despots and liberating them from the slave trade, which remained active on the African continent. The Quaker firm of Cadbury’s was caught within this imperial contradiction when William Cadbury became aware in 1901 that more than half the high-quality cocoa the company sourced from Portuguese São Tomé and Príncipe was produced by slaves.22 At the same time they took pride in assuring their customers that they never knowingly bought slave-harvested cocoa to make their drinking powder and confectionery. William solved the dilemma in a characteristically imperial fashion by safeguarding his business interests before acting on his moral principles. He immediately began looking for other sources of cocoa but it took him nine years before he was able to secure an alternative supply from the Gold Coast. Only then, when they no longer needed it, did Cadbury’s boycott cocoa from Portuguese Africa.23
At the turn of the twentieth century the British held up their cheap white wheaten loaf made from imported grain as ‘a symbol of national greatness and freedom’, a visible demonstration of the benefits of liberalism and the empire of free trade.24 In contrast, they pointed to the heavy black rye bread of Germany to demonstrate the shortcomings of autocracy and protectionism. German social commentators, on the other hand, saw black bread as a symbol of their traditional values and collective strength. They warned German citizens, who showed clear signs of liking white wheaten bread, that the integrity of the nation would be undermined if Germany were to follow Britain’s example and become dependent on foreign farmers for its food.25 German anxieties were comparable to those of the Chinese in the early nineteenth century, who were dismayed by the flow of silver out of their country to buy opium. Importing wheat used precious foreign currency, and just as the Chinese projected social anxieties about the weakening of the nation onto the practice of opium smoking, so the Germans were told that white bread would turn them into anaemic weaklings.26
In the 1920s post-war world of depression, when many countries withdrew into nationalist policies of protection, Britain no longer felt like the cheerful Genius of the Currant who embraced free trade safe in the knowledge that commerce would secure his food supply. In a lecture delivered at Nottingham University in 1926, the agriculturalist Daniel Hall argued that while Britain could not hope to achieve food self-sufficiency within the confines of the island, it could look to its empire and source more of its food from ‘our friends, our relatives and our own folk’ in order to become ‘a self-contained unit’.27 Hall’s definition of empire was much narrower than Mr Oldknow’s commercial one and encompassed only those countries under the umbrella of the British Crown. He suggested expanding cattle ranching in central and southern Africa to replace Argentina as the nation’s source of chilled beef, and argued for greater investment in farming in the colonies.28 Food choices were politicised. Just as German housewives’ associations campaigned for women to buy home-grown apples rather than imported oranges, the British Women’s Patriotic League tried to persuade consumers to buy Australian rather than Californian currants and sultanas. (California had switched from growing wheat to market gardening.) As part of the campaign in 1924 the League published a recipe for an Empire Christmas pudding, which sourced the dried fruit from Australia and the rest of the ingredients from other British colonies.29
On 20 December 1926, Lord Meath, the organiser of the Empire Day movement, invited representatives from various colonies to make just such an Empire Christmas pudding in the grounds of Vernon House, the headquarters of the Overseas League in London. The ceremony was captured on film and was shown on cinema newsreels all over the country. As each ingredient was carried in by turbaned Indian servants it was formally announced as if it were a guest at a ball and was then added to an enormous mixing bowl. The ceremony finished with representatives from Canada, Australia, South Africa, British Guiana, Jamaica and India coming together to give the pudding a collective ritual stir.30 Part of the invented tradition of the Victorian Christmas was Stir-up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent, when the pudding was made to give it time to age and each member of the family gave the mixture a stir while making a wish. The Empire Day pudding ceremony created a powerful visual image of the Empire as Britain’s family.
The event was given a further boost when the royal family agreed to eat the Empire Marketing Board’s version of an Empire pudding that Christmas Day. The next year royal participation in the campaign went a step further when the king’s chef supplied the Empire Marketing Board with the recipe for the Christmas pudding George V and his family would be eating at Sandringham; it was published with the name of a colony listed next to each ingredient. The Empire Christmas pudding revived the Victorian conflation of Englishness and Empire. Everyone in the country, from the king to the lowliest of his subjects in ‘every household throughout the length and breadth of the British Empire’, would be sitting down at the same time to eat exactly the same pudding made with ingredients from all over the Empire. This was a powerful ritual that consolidated the national and imperial into one community.31
When the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933, they regarded the British Empire with some envy. They wanted to spend foreign currency reserves on rearmament rather than on food imports and attempted to withdraw from the world market and achieve national self-sufficiency. In National Socialist rhetoric white bread was portrayed as the degenerate product of louche ‘Anglo-American’–in the dog-whistle politics of the time, the audience heard or read ‘Jewish’–democracy while wholemeal bread was the patriotic and wholesome food of a healthy Aryan race.32 Hitler was convinced that in order to achieve wealth and prosperity and, most importantly, autonomy, Germany needed its own empire. In his (never published) sequel to Mein Kampf, the so-called ‘Second Book’ written in 1928, he identified the plains of fertile black earth in the Ukraine and Russia as the place where Germans would find sufficient Lebensraum or living space. The British tended to draw a veil over the brutal suppression of the indigenous people whose land they had appropriated. But in an analysis unfettered by moral scruples, Hitler took inspiration from the British and American examples. He wrote with admiration of the way the United States had exterminated the Native Americans and claimed that ‘here in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America’.33 In an uncanny echo of Elizabethan plans to relocate the Irish to a zone in the west beyond the River Shannon, the bureaucrats in the SS Department for the Settlement of the East devised a scheme to deport the Slav population to the Soviet Arctic zone, where they would join European Jews in working themselves to death.34
Britain’s empire was a source of strength during the war that inevitably followed Hitler’s rise to power. In the post-war years the revolution effected by wartime agricultural advances restored Britain’s agricultural sector to productivity. Today British farmers provide the population with 84 per cent of their meat and nearly half their grain. With the gradual loss of its colonies Britain turned back to Europe as its main trading partner and the European Union is now the primary source of British food imports, supplying the United Kingdom with 28 per cent of its food.35
In 1601, Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, confidently asserted that ‘whosoever doth not maintain the Plough, destroys this Kingdom’; in 1850, in contrast, Mr Oldknow proudly celebrated Britain’s dependence on food imports.36 Each held to their opposing view with conviction. Those days of certainty about agriculture have long since gone. We now worry about the ecological impact of the green revolution and whether we really want to eat vegetables liberally sprinkled with pesticides or meat impregnated with growth hormones. And if not, how would it be possible to make organic food affordable for all? Our concern about the carbon footprint of our meals leaves us weighing up whether it is better to eat tomatoes ripened in sunny climes and transported great distances by lorry or to opt for ones grown locally in heated greenhouses. Nowadays we find ourselves buying an array of foodstuffs in packaging emblazoned with Union Jacks in a celebration of local food production that smacks uncomfortably of 1930s nationalism. We no longer feel confident that we know the answer to the question of how we should grow or acquire our food.
The integration of foreign foods and cooking techniques into the culinary repertoire is a worldwide phenomenon. Often, all that was required for an imported food to be claimed by a people as their own was for them to eat it in sufficient quantity. West Indian molasses gave Newfoundland’s lumberjacks and fishermen the energy they needed for hard physical work and they added it to virtually everything they ate, from brown bread to chicken and potato pie.37 A large crock of molasses ‘was always on the table’ in the Newfoundland of the past and a local ditty claims that only if you pour molasses on your doughboys and your porridge, and even on your fish and brewis (a mix of salt cod and hardtack), are you ‘a real true Newfie, remembering the way it used to be’.38 In turn, as the food of the slaves, Newfoundland salt cod became so entrenched in the diets of Africans in the West Indies that on Jamaica, salt fish and ackee–a West African vegetable–is often cited as the national dish.39 Southern Americans now claim distinctively West African dishes such as gumbo and Hoppin’ John as their own regional foods. And if slavery firmly incorporated African foodstuffs and cookery into the foodscape of the Americas, in Africa, American maize has supplanted millet, sorghum and rice in the diets of the majority of the population. Indeed, many Africans refer to it as ‘maize of the ancestors’ and have no notion that it was introduced to the continent relatively recently by the Portuguese and British colonial officials.40 To trace the history of the ‘national’ foods of former British colonies is to create a map of the web of connections the British Empire wove around the globe.
The ease with which foods travel the globe and reappear as ‘national’ foods in their new host countries should serve as a reminder that the notion is an illusion. French officials in Vietnam were as anxious as their counterparts in British India to recreate French food. However, they relied on British and American food imports, with the result that the ‘French bread’ consumed in the colony was often made by a Chinese baker with Australian wheat flour.41 Shared food habits and tastes create the feeling that we belong to a larger group. When Scots eat haggis, neaps and tatties on Burns Night and American families gather at Thanksgiving to enjoy turkey and all the trimmings, including cranberries, corn and pumpkin pie, the entire population appears to be simultaneously putting on a performance of the nation.42 Thanksgiving apparently connects Americans to the mythologised founding of the nation, and yet it was only in the nineteenth century that the Pilgrim Fathers were inserted into a celebration that had grown out of the English tradition of the harvest festival. Nor was Thanksgiving always seen in a positive light by all Americans. Some Southerners regarded it as a Yankee abolitionist holiday when in 1863, in an attempt to bring together a country riven by civil war, Abraham Lincoln declared that it would henceforward be a national holiday.43 Although the British Empire has long since been dismantled, its legacy lives on in how Britain and its former colonies define their national identities.
In December 1985, an article in The Times used the Victorian device of depicting the globe as a plum pudding and on its surface traced the route that was taken by a Christmas pudding sent to the diplomats in the British embassy in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. The pudding was said to have sustained ‘the morale… the indomitable Britishness of the group stranded in the cheerless waste’.44 The tone was reminiscent of articles that appeared in Victorian periodicals recounting how intrepid colonials went to great lengths to keep up Christmas traditions in the wilds of the Empire, boiling their puddings by immersing them in springs of bubbling mud in New Guinea or concocting them out of biscuit, sugar and brandy in the Australian outback.45 We still celebrate Christmas with an orgy of foods infused with sugar and spices–mince pies, Christmas cake and pudding, mulled wine–but nowadays it is the turkey, not the plum pudding, that is the centrepiece of our Christmas meal. Introduced to England from North America in the sixteenth century, these enormous birds remained out of reach of the pocket of the average working man until the 1950s, when factory farming made turkey affordable for the masses.46
The expatriate British went to great lengths to eat plum pudding on Christmas Day no matter where they were. In the 1870s Crosse & Blackwell exported more than a thousand tinned plum puddings to India, China and Australia. By the 1940s New Zealand canning companies were producing their own and capitalising on ‘olde English’ imagery of snow and Father Christmas on his sledge to sell them despite the fact that it was midsummer in New Zealand in December.
In her fictional diary, Bridget Jones recorded that on August Bank Holiday her mother had rung her apparently to ask what she would like for Christmas. After a mystifying conversation discussing the merits of pull-along suitcases with wheels, Mrs Jones reverted to the real reason for the phone call. ‘“Now darling,” she suddenly hissed, “you will be coming to Geoffrey and Una’s New Year’s Day Turkey Curry Buffet this year, won’t you?”’ The ‘rich, divorced-by-cruel-wife’, ‘top-notch lawyer’ Mark Darcy would be there, and her mother was determined to set Bridget up with this suitable man.47 On the day itself, Bridget, who obsessively records her overeating in her diary, noted that she ate a ‘portion of Una Alconbury’s turkey curry, peas and bananas’ as well as a ‘portion of Una Alconbury’s Raspberry Surprise made with Bourbon biscuits, tinned raspberries, eight gallons of whipped cream, decorated with glacé cherries and angelica’.48 She also met Mark, the man she was destined to marry, who was dressed in a tasteless diamond-patterned jumper.49 What could be more British than a story based on a Jane Austen novel in which the hero and heroine fall in love at Christmas over an Indian-inspired dish of curried turkey?