40 days till Christmas. Ya ready?

A recipe for Pumpkin (and marrons) glacé, mincemeat and more

Heresy alert: Christmas is not my favourite celebration.

Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

Christmas comes but once a year and when it comes it brings…Aunt Gwendoline with her gummy lipstick kisses, Uncle Bernie, devotee of the pun, all those dreadful cousins, more jokey socks, and yet another backscrubber.

I love everything about Christmas except the actual day. Of course I’m exaggerating. But it does come burdened with so many expectations that it rarely meets them unless you’re under ten years old. There’s the panic and the sweat in the kitchen (why does that happen? After all, the feast is no more than a glorified Sunday lunch), there’s the disappointment, barely suppressed, that when you had said you wanted the romance of travel, you were given not a cruise around the South China Sea but a tandem bicycle. Hands up how many women have received a vacuum cleaner or other household appliance? 

The fun of Christmas for me is in November, with Thanksgiving. That celebration involves no presents. The company around the table includes conciliatory friends who keep the festivities on an even keel, no-one stays for three days, and because you’ve gorged on turkey, you don’t have to produce one at Christmas but can feast instead off lobster or a side of beef.

November is also the month to prep in a leisurely fashion for Christmas preserves, freezable Christmas cookie dough, and home-made edible Christmas presents. If you were going to make mincemeat (which these days does not contain any meat but comes from mincing ‘sweetmeats’, i.e. dried fruits and nuts, preserved in brandy), you should have done it in September. But you could get away with putting it together now and if you make it in large enough quantity to store, it will improve with age - perfect for next Christmas and Christmases to come. (Don’t gag. My best ever mince pies were created with a jar I unearthed of mincemeat that was 12 years old, though the firemen involved in the Feydeau farce of that Christmas were suspicious enough of what the word ‘mincemeat’ encompassed not to stay around to taste any of the pies they were offered for putting out not one but two fires.) 

You can even wait until the week of Christmas to make the Queen Mother’s favourite fruitcake which I consider far superior to the cannonball confection that should have been maturing in your pantry with its weekly whisky dousing at least since the summer - of this or some previous year. And you’re still in time to make this recipe for your own marrons glacés -crystallised chestnuts. They’re one of my favourite treats but somehow only to be eaten at Christmas.

Sadly, if you live in the US, chestnuts are no longer readily available. The trees have been almost extinct for decades, felled by a blight that took hold in the early 1800s called ink disease and followed in the early 20th century by chestnut blight, which decimated Eastern US chestnut forests.

The chestnut tree is possibly the most useful of all forest trees. It isn’t just for their nuts that they are popular, Their timber is also desirable, in home construction, cabinetry and furniture, utility poles, railroad ties, and musical instruments. Many ecologists consider its decline one of the greatest ecological disasters to strike the US since European contact. In Britain, the smell of chestnuts roasting on an open fire (oh, am I plagiarising someone there?) in London streets with a brazier on every corner is part of the build up to Christmas. The Brits have been fortunate enough in their constant supply of chestnuts that antique stores not uncommonly have one or two vintage, even historical, chestnut brass or copper roasting pans for sale.

The first American fan of the sweet chestnut (not the inedible horse chestnut which produces conkers) was Thomas Jefferson. In 1773, at his Virginia garden at Monticello near Charlottesville, he grafted European chestnut cuttings onto native American chestnuts. His efforts were followed by the excellently named E.I du Pont de Nemours. When Monsieur du Pont de Nemours moved from France in 1799 to Bergen Point, New Jersey, and then on three years later to Brandywine, Delaware, he planted European chestnuts he had imported with him, giving their seedlings to friends and acquaintances. 

In 1876, plant collector Thomas Hogg departed for Japan, in this lovely description from The Horticulturist And Journal Of Rural Art And Rural Taste of 1853-1874: “Some few weeks since our old and valued friend, Mr. Hogg, bade us good by (sic), and took his departure for a new field of labor in Japan. We parted with him, as did scores of others, with feelings of the deepest regret, having the consolation of knowing, however, that he was going to a field which had filled his dreams for years. Probably no person has yet visited Japan better fitted as a collector of plants.” 

From Japan, Thomas Hogg sold seeds (the edible nuts) of the Japanese chestnut tree in 1876 to S.B. Parsons of Flushing, New York. He in turn sold on seedlings of ‘Parsons Japan’, two of which, planted in Connecticut in 1876, are still thriving. Six years later, William Parry of New Jersey imported 100 grafted trees from Japan and in 1886, Luther Burbank in California imported 10,000 nuts from Japan, selling their seedlings by mail order.

Then blight decimated almost every tree. Before 1910, when Chestnut Blight Disease struck, there were around 130 million mature American chestnut trees in Connecticut alone, about half of all the state’s standing timer. Take heart, though. The American Chestnut Foundation has been working to create a blight-resistant American chestnut to repopulate the forests. Until chestnuts are prolific once more, you can make a version of marrons glacés with pumpkin. Sweetened pumpkin is popular in Japan where several desserts using Kabocha pumpkin are considered a treat.

Kabocha yokan is a Japanese jelly made from pumpkin pulp, sugar, water and agar agar to thicken it, and is sold in a block then cut into cubes or slices to serve.

This recipe is not altogether different - a Mexican one from the Dixie sugar company. Calabaza en Tacha is traditionally served on Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead but I think worth making for something different to put on the table at Christmas. I’d be pleased to be given a jar of it as a present instead of the kitchen scrubbers I once received.

1 small-medium pumpkin (about 2.25kg/5 lbs)
400g/14oz/2 cups light brown sugar 
60g/2oz butter
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Cut the pumpkin in half and scrape out the strings and seeds with the point of a teaspoon. Cut the pumpkin into 2cm/1in cubes. It’s up to you whether you leave the skin on or remove it with a potato peeler. I prefer the look of it peeled. Put the cubes in a large saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat then reduce the heat and simmer 15 minutes or until tender.

Remove pumpkin to a dish with a slotted spoon but keep the water. Measure 235ml/1½ cups of the water into a saucepan. Add the sugar, butter and cinnamon. Bring to a boil and reduce heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has melted.

Return the pumpkin to the pan and simmer for 15-20 minutes or until syrup thickens. Fish the pumpkin chunks out with a slotted spoon to a sieve set over a bowl to catch the drips, then store in a lidded jar in the fridge to serve on a dish with toothpicks.