The Inimitable Spirit of A Kolkata Christmas

Kolkata’s Christmas celebrations represent an inclusivity that embraces all: a colonial past; traditional bakeries run by different communities; Muslim bakers; customers of all faiths; and a piece of cake that binds them.

My grandfather would hold my small, pudgy hand tightly, so I wouldn’t get lost, as we made our way through the hullabaloo of Kolkata’s Hogg (New) Market in the second week of December, to buy a small Christmas tree in. It was our annual tradition — buy a tiny tree and a few ornaments, drink a fuzzy cola each, and then stop by Nahoum & Sons for a decadent fruit-filled Christmas cake, and my favourite, almond pastries. My grandfather would have a chat with David Nahoum, the late owner of Kolkata’s sole (and over-a-century-old, estd 1916!) Jewish bakery in the market, while I would soak up the atmosphere and revel in the smells of fresh cakes. They would go down memory lane together, remembering school days, as I would longingly stare at the display cases, made of century-old glass and teakwood, my eyes widening at the sweet treats on offer. There was always a queue of patient customers beyond the glass displays, waiting outside the iconic shop to buy their Christmas cakes.

Christmas means family, food, presents, plump Santas, decorated trees and decadent cake. The Christmas cake, the one we are familiar with today, filled with fruits, nuts and spices, has a rather interesting and culturally intertwined back-story. Marian Burros writes in the New York Times Magazine: ‘The Romans had a version called satura, a mixture of barley mash, dried raisins, pine nuts and pomegranate seeds, laced with condiments and honeyed wine… Some form of fruitcake is common to many European countries. The English were making plum cakes — plum being the generic word for dried fruits — much as we know them now, in the mid-17th century’ (Lasting Legacy of Fruitcake; December 1, 1985).

In England, the first mention of a porridge, eaten on Christmas Eve, surfaced in works in the late 14th century. Called frumenty, it was soupy with wheat, meats and dried fruits, and eaten to ‘line the stomachs’ after a period of fasting. Over the next century or so, with the exclusion of meats and inclusion of dried fruits and nuts, spices, honey, eggs, butter, flour and spirits, the porridge changed nature to a pudding in mid-17th century as an end to a Christmas meal. An enriched fruit-filled cake, back then, was associated with the Twelfth Night celebrations, to be eaten on the twelfth night (January 5) that ended Christmas merriment.

From the 1830s thereabout, Christmas celebrations heightened and Twelfth Night festivities declined. Society by then, had become more urban, and industrial working shifts were dominant, a far cry from the old agrarian lifestyle. Victorian-era bakers capitalised on this, and fruit-laden cakes gained popularity over the next 40 years. In 1870, Twelfth Night celebrations were banned by Queen Victoria. By then, the cake we celebrate Christmas with today, a sweet hybrid merger of the fruit cake and plum pudding, had become a permanent fixture. Literature gives us examples of the surging popularity of the term ‘Christmas cake’­­—Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) mentions it, as does Lady Barker’s A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters (1871). The first printed Christmas cake recipe was published by Isabella Beeton in The Book of Household Management (1861), suggests Leach, Browne and Inglis in their book, The Twelve Cakes of Christmas (2011).

The cake began to travel to Britain’s many colonies around that time. Families would prepare the treat to be sent to their loved ones abroad, with wine and gifts, sometimes months in advance. ‘Wherever they went in the world, the English took their Christmas with them,’ wrote Australian historian Ken Inglis (1974). In India, the story goes, a man named Mambally Bapu, who had returned from Burma after learning the art of biscuit-making, set up his own bakery in 1880 in Thalasserry. Three years later, a British cinnamon planter named Murdoch Brown came to Bapu’s Royal Biscuit Factory, with a plum cake from home, requesting the baker taste and recreate something similar. On December 23, it is said, Bapu baked the first Christmas cake in India. Over time, the cake become a regular feature of the December festivities in parts of the country with a colonial stronghold, holding its own among unique regional sweet delicacies.

Erstwhile Calcutta, now Kolkata, was British India’s first capital, and home to numerous different religious communities. It still is, though numbers have dwindled. As a Bengali-Calcuttan, Christmas has always been about festivity rather than religion. And the presence of the Christmas cake is a must, no matter which community one belongs to. Plum cake is a ritual, if I may. We would drive by Park Street to see the lit décor, caught in maddening traffic jams, and watch the crowds jostle along the footpaths, witness the ridiculously long line of people outside Flurys (a tearoom set up by a Swiss expat couple in 1927), waiting to buy cakes, and Santa hats on revellers. And there was always cake at home, from Nahoum’s or gifted by friends.

That’s the peculiar thing about Christmas celebrations, and Christmas cake in the city. Despite its obvious derivation from a very colonial past, both remain very secular in nature.

Kolkata’s Durga Puja is a showy affair, but Christmas is quainter. Non-residents come home; colonial-continental dishes in club menus become winter specials in local cafés; there are no Puja pandals, but Park Street is abuzz with lights and chaos, carols blaring; animated discussions regarding club Christmas lunches can be overheard; midnight mass at St Paul’s cathedral is a must; and long-snaking lines at the city’s traditional bakeries to buy Christmas cakes is a given. But after the British left, and the Anglo and Jewish populations began to decline, was it necessary to continue the festivities? “Calcuttans need an excuse for celebration,” says well-known radio jockey and writer, Deepanjan Ghosh. He believes Christmas time is Kolkata’s biggest street-party festival. “Where in the city do you find fireplaces? But the association of Santa climbing down one is ingrained in our minds, from childhood. You’ll find more outsiders than community members at Bow Barracks (an Anglo neighbourhood in central Kolkata) and St Paul’s today. Everyone wants an experience,” he adds.

Every Christmas, Paula Fernandes throws open her home to family and friends from various communities. An Anglo-Indian married to an East Indian with Goan ancestry, she painstakingly bakes her Christmas cakes at home in small batches over a period of time. “The process starts from November when I go and buy all the dried fruits and peels, different nuts, eggs, flour, butter, sugar, etc. from New Market,” she says. Following her grandmother’s recipe which calls for a kilogram of each ingredient (except butter, which requires double the amount), a lot of rum, and 50 eggs, Fernandes’ recipe yields 32 pounds of cake. The fruits are finely chopped, then sun-dried, before all the ingredients are mixed and poured into cake tins. They go inside the oven at a low and steady heat for hours on end. The cakes are then left to mature for a few weeks, before the pièce de résistance is cut into, after a meat-heavy Anglo-Indian Christmas lunch. The rest of the cakes are distributed. “Anglos put a marzipan topping on cakes we consider milestones, which is why my Christmas cake has them,” she says. “Every family has their own recipe. The basic recipe is the same, but the tweaks each individual makes, lend the cakes different identities,” she smiles. A friend of hers, who immigrated to Australia, bakes her cakes in October to give them enough time to rest.

Kolkata is home to many bakeries, old and new. The Saldanha bakery (both factory and shop), is housed in the premises of the family’s colonial-style building on Nawab Abdur Rahman Street. Established in 1930 by Ubelina Saldanha, the bakery is now run by the next three generations — daughter-in-law Mona, Mona’s daughter Debra Alexander, and Debra’s daughter Alisha. The family’s roots lie in Salegaon, Goa. Saldanha is renowned for its wedding and Christmas cakes, but over time, Alisha, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu in London, seamlessly infused newer baked goods. “We start getting requests in by November. Making the cake at home is time consuming, so people prefer to buy it. Christmas in the city is celebrated in every community,” says Debra. Saldanha Christmas cakes are known for using quality ingredients. The pandemic has affected all businesses but Debra is proud to not have closed shop, for even a single day. “We adapted. We started delivering, reached out to clients, got on social media. All this with no compromise on hygiene, cleanliness and sanitisation,” she says, a shift from their traditional business model based on word-of-mouth, and generational customers. A female-run business, the Saldanhas don’t get to take Christmas Day off because people come to their bakery to see a vestige of old-time cosmopolitan charm. “It really isn’t a shop-shop, you know. People bring in the Christmas spirit,” Debra says. And no one goes away empty-handed despite the long lines.

According to scholars, it is widely believed the Magi who came bearing gifts for an infant Jesus were Zoroastrian priests; a long-standing link between the faiths. Michelle Nowrojee likes the Saldanha cakes. A Kolkata Parsi, she and her father order their plum cakes for gifting in early December. “The last time I made a fruit cake at home was about three years ago. Do you know, I soaked the fruits in alcohol for over a year!” she laughs. Kunashni Daver, another Kolkata Parsi, now based in Hyderabad, has warm memories of Christmas celebrations at the Calcutta Parsee Club amid community members, with lots of activities, good food and merriment. “My father gets our cakes from Nahoum’s and also from an elderly Parsi aunty who bakes them at her home on Park Street. Her’s has more rum!” Daver confides. She can’t often go back to Kolkata during Christmas due to the nature of her high-pressure job, but she misses it. “No other city has that Christmas feeling,” Daver says wistfully.

Image by Rose Tommy

Nahoum & Sons’s fruit and plum cakes are legendary. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, the late Geoffrey Fischer, thought so. He apparently declared their fruit cake the best he’d ever had. “We have never compromised on quality or ingredients, since inception,” says Jagadish Halder, the manager of the Jewish bakery. The bakery was started by a Baghdadi Jew named Nahoum Israel Mordecai in 1902, and despite Kolkata’s declining Jewish population, the shop has stood the test of time. “Our cake production increases to 16 hours a day, in the last half of December,” he says, and estimates that production exceeds 1,000 pounds of cake daily. The cakes can go up to 30 days without refrigeration. and travels well. “We ship all over the country, but mostly our customers carry them internationally, when they return home,” Halder, who has been with the bakery for 42 years, tell us. He tells us about a customer who has his cakes shipped to Delhi, to be able to internationally courier it to his daughter in the United States. Their customer base is a mix of communities like Bengali, Muslim, Chinese and Christians, and various establishments including government institutions. The bakers at the Hartford Lane factory, too, hail from different communities — Hindus, Muslims, Christians — many who’ve been there for generations. “Christmas is for all,” Halder states.

For many families who can’t bake cakes at home, they turn to local Muslim-run bakeries during December, where they can rent out ovens. These Muslim bakeries are busy with biscuits, breads and barkakhanis year-round, but come Christmas, they focus on cakes. Brandon Rozario recalls his grandmother doing it. “I remember bakers going to houses about end October, and getting the families to book baking slots. Once the slot is booked, you take your ingredients on the particular day to the bakery. Everything is mixed according to each family’s specifications, and the baker puts them in batches to bake with your name on top, on wax paper,” he says. At such bakeries, it’s not just one family, but a few at a time, whose cakes are baked together, so identification is important. Rozario’s family have been frequenting a local Muslim-run bakery on Christopher Road, in recent years.

Ajmeri Bakery, near Bow Barracks, starts Christmas preparations from early December. “We get the peels, cashews, raisins, almonds and everything ready. We do employ more help during December for our cakes. We start with 60-120 cakes in the first batch, get our daily customers to taste and give feedback, then start our production in earnest,” says Basar, the current and seventh-generation owner, who laughs when asked approximately how many cakes they bake. Their biggest asset is their old wood-fired oven. “Their shop shelves, which usually holds bread, is filled with cakes during Christmas,” attests photographer Manjit Singh Hoonjan, who runs Calcutta Photo Tours. Hoonjan, a third-generation Punjabi in the city, has warm memories of Christmas from school days. “We would celebrate all festivals. During December, my father would get locally-baked cakes lined with butter paper for us,” he says. “Today, not just the old names, but every bakery in the city stocks up with fruit cakes, including street hawkers in the Dalhousie office para (neighbourhood) for office-goers’ convenience to take back on their way home.”

Asha Jhangiani’s mother was Roman Catholic and she’s been baking Christmas cakes for a quarter of a century. At the insistence of her family, the home baker began selling her cakes through word-of-mouth. Come early November, she gets her family together, and they chop the fruits, sun dry them for about a week, and then soak them in spirits. Once the orders pour in, she calls her baker, who has been associated with the family since her mother’s time, to come and mix the ingredients for her. Individual foils filled with batter are then taken to his bakery with a family member in tow, baked for hours on low heat, and then brought back home. “It’s easily over a 100 pounds of cake,” says Jhangiani, whose cakes travel to different countries through her customers. This year, she isn’t sure of how many orders she can cater to. Her baker returned to his village during the pandemic, and his bakery was broken down and the property sold. The plight is real: many local bakeries are on prime real estate in different parts of the city, and several, over the years, have been lost.

Vivek Ghosh’s parents live in a village near Bokaro. His English mother brings back a stock of blackberries from England every couple of years, while the remaining shopping is done just prior to Christmas, at New Market. The family bakes at least 12-16 cakes a season, but two at a time, inside aluminium handis filled with sand that is slowly heated on the burners. It takes almost a full day, because if the sand cools down, bringing it back to the desired temperature takes time. Throughout Vivek’s schooling in Varanasi, and then college in Kolkata, his mother’s unique homemade cakes were always been a hit, religion no bar. “Everyone clamoured for a piece,” says the Gurugram-based data analyst.

The funny truth is these cakes can be found all year round. “If you go to Flurys, they will always have a few plum cakes on their shelves. But come December, these cakes will be stocked floor-to-ceiling because of demand,” Deepanjan laughs. He feels these cakes have become so associated with seasonality that people willingly wait hours to be able to get their hands on one. Personally, he swears by the cakes from the iconic Park Street tearoom. “Every bite takes me down memory lane.”

At home, my parents, who will soon celebrate 40 years together, will fight over sweets like they always do: my father’s craving to eat them, and my mother’s hope to reign in his sweet tooth. The number of fruit cakes consumed have reduced over the years, but they are still very much part of December gatherings. “Don’t forget to pick up the cakes,” my father calls out when I leave for New Market. “Cakes are indispensable to Christmas celebrations,” he argues with my mother, who inevitably tells me not to get them, overhearing her partner’s bellowing request. This year, I will miss the banter in real time. Like me, Calcuttans around the world who won’t be able to go home, will miss out on slices of fruit cake too.

The celebration of all festivals is what makes Kolkata unique. “There still exists a strong colonial hangover but all festivals are celebrated with gusto. There is exclusivity in terms of following traditions and not cutting corners, but at the same time, there is an inclusivity that embraces all. Kolkata is a melting pot of cultures, like New York but on a high,” says Hoonjan. It’s a rather apt description for Kolkata’s Christmas cakes: a colonial past; traditional bakeries run by different communities; Muslim bakers; customers of all faiths; and a piece of cake that binds them. If that isn’t the concept of secularism in practice, what is?

Sharmistha Chaudhuri is a writer from India and currently based in Austin, Texas. You can read more of her work on her website and her Instagram page.

Images by Rose Tommy

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