PAST PERFECT— KOLKATA STYLE!

The year is sometime in the 1960s. It’s a crisp, foggy winter morning in Kolkata. The smell of luchi floats through the air even as households slowly wake up to their Sunday routine. A dainty Studebaker Commander glides out of the garage from a narrow lane in north Kolkata. Not too far away, a highway-hardened Hindustan Ambassador roars out. The destination for both is the same – Sahebpara, loosely translated to mean the areas of Chowringhee, Esplanade and Park Street. The occasion: Christmas, which is around the corner. Hence, a cake must be bought. The choices? The same two, mostly – Flurys or Nahoum & Sons.

Decades later, a little girl would repeat what her parents did while growing up in the City of Joy – just that she would always choose Nahoum for the plum cake and Flurys for the birthday cake.

Cakes as Childhood
It would be the same routine for a Parsi girl for whom cakes were an integral part of childhood. Because Christmas and December meant cakes from all relatives. “Grandma would get us a cake from Nahoum, the Flurys cake came from grandpa, while dad got us a cake from Saldanha Bakery,” food writer Rukshana A. Kapadia, Co-founder, Ammolite Ideators Food Service Consultants, fondly reminisces.

Growing up in Kolkata in the 90s, some things were a given. You always shopped at Shriram Arcade or Metro Plaza, you always went to Scoop for ice cream, Mocambo or Trincas for a fancy dinner, to the clubs for Christmas and New Year parties and you always bought your cakes from Flurys and Nahoum.

There is nothing that screams Christmas more than the cakes – especially something that has remained unchanged in shape and taste over the decades – the plum cake. And the celebrations are not limited to the Christian community alone. As journalist and food writer Vir Sanghvi says, “Christmas is big in Goa and other places with a large Christian community. But in Kolkata, it is a secular festival. It isn’t just Christians who celebrate it. For instance, the best plum cake used to come from Nahoum, which was a Jewish bakery. Like everything else there in the days when old Mr Nahoum ran the bakery, it was a labour of love.”

Baking for Bada Din
For Anand Puri, the owner of the legendary Trincas, the Dundee cake remains a special memory. “There used to be a lot of Christmas cakes that used to come home. The Nahoum plum cake, Dundee from Britannia, some came with sugar crusting, some with marzipan with a tinge of almond, but I always remember the Dundee cake that used to be baked upside down in a tin container and we would have it that way. It smelled like Christmas. Everyone in the family had their own way of eating it. I preferred straight from the box,” says Puri.

For the city’s now tiny Anglo-Indian community, this was the time when a visit to New Market was mandatory. Ingredients like dry fruits, tutti-frutti, red and green dyed orange peels, glazed red cherries, green and black raisins, rum, etc., had to be bought. Then they would create their own batter and mix dry fruits. Back in the day, most people didn’t have ovens at home to bake cakes. Cakes had to be made and distributed to friends and family as well for “Bada Din”. So, there would be beelines outside small bakeries with the batter to bake them in their ovens. “When we were young, we would stand like a hawk over the process so that they ‘don’t get ripped off, men!’,” says journalist Stephanie Sweeney, laughing.

Debra Alexander, the owner of yet another iconic bakery, Saldanha, remembers it all too well, as if it were just yesterday. The 58-year-old gave up her banking job to follow in her father’s footsteps to run the bakery started by her grandmother and where she literally grew up. “Back in the day, a lot of families would come with their ingredients to bake their cakes. Unfortunately, it started getting difficult as the business expanded and the demand increased. Hence, we started referring them to bakers around,” says Debra, who along with her daughter Alisha Alexander (a Le Cordon Bleu alumna), now runs the bakery.

Memories That Linger
For Rukshana, bakeries like Saldanha, Great Eastern Bakery, Nahoum and Flurys still hold a special place in her heart. Cakes, and especially plum cakes, have been a part of her growing up, the way it has been for most denizens of the city. As Sanghvi puts it: “It’s worth remembering that plum cake for Christmas is mostly a British thing (not so common elsewhere) and Kolkata was the city most connected to British tradition.”

Rukshana feels that while the packaging has improved these days and the cakes certainly look better and more polished, she yearns for the times when plum cakes “helped us extend Christmas and the spirit of Christmas.” She still remembers fondly the cake from Flurys that would be covered in hard marzipan icing, and each bakery had its own flavour. Then there were cakes made at home as well. In her house, the tradition was tossing a coin in the batter, and then the excitement that followed while cutting the cake as to who would get the coin were some of the warm memories that she carries with her.

Sanghvi, whose favourite plum cake was always Nahoum, remembers being confused as a child by the difference between plum pudding and plum cake. “That’s my earliest memory. And I am still not sure what the difference is! But as a child I used to get inordinately excited when they flambéed it,” he says.

Vikas Kumar, executive chef at Flurys, says the recipe of their iconic plum cake has remained unchanged over the decades. “The only thing that has changed is the number of plum cakes we make every year. I’m sure the main recipe is at least 100 years old, and we have changed nothing of it,” he assures.

It’s the memory of the plum cake that has propelled Puri from Trincas to come up with a whole new cocktail named Christmas Cake this season. “We have used all the flavours you get in a Christmas cake,” he says.

That’s the thing about Christmastide — you always associate it with memories. And after all, is there anything that smells sweeter than memories of times gone by?