Miles Kington: Steamed for Mrs Cratchit - with a washing-day smell

For a change this year, at Christmas breakfast, my wife decided to dish up a huge and wonderful bowl of kedgeree, and as the 12 of us dug in to the delicate dish (Did I say 12? Where did we all come from?) and the fragrant festive spirit of haddock, eggs, fresh chopped parsley and rice spread abroad, I thought just for a moment that we were all in danger of getting too happy, too soon, on Christmas Day.

So I pulled out of my pocket a cutting from The New York Times, printed the day before, and read the main gist of it to the assembled mob. The piece was about Christmas pudding.

It said, basically, that if history had been different, the Americans might have been lumbered with Christmas pudding on 25 December, instead of pumpkin pie. That nobody really likes Christmas pudding. Not even in Britain. That it was just a historical hangover from the times when people liked fruit and meat mixed together, and had to think of various ways of drying and preserving both.

"In the end," said the piece, "it was steamed for five hours, to be delivered to a table like poor Mrs Cratchit's, with its smell (and, too often, taste) like washing day. Thus it's little surprise that today the pudding is served only once a year once too many for most. This is where America comes in. While the English hung on to their pudding with steadily decreasing enthusiasm for centuries, they let go another great Elizabethan favourite, that might have had more staying power: pumpkin pie."

My wife, who hates dried fruit, was strangely silent, but there was a gratifying growl of rage and fury from everyone else, including 15-month old Errol, who already knows instinctively when to vote with the majority. Those who had not been quite sure a moment before if they actually did like the beast or not, suddenly realised how good Christmas pudding really was. Visions of rum and brandy butter materialised. Sprigs of holly being bathed in brandy, being set alight and burning houses down, possibly belonging to American neighbours how appealing! Our blood felt cleaner and purer for this revivifying surge of anti-Americanism.

"How DARE they tell us how to eat pumpkin?" said Renata, my Italian daughter-in-law. "We have some very good recipes for pumpkin and ravioli in Italy. Also, it goes well with Parmesan. What you do is, you take..."

"Whatever you do, don't do it with American pumpkins," said my son. "They won't taste of anything. It's a clich, but it's true everything in America is grown to be bigger, better and totally tasteless. American plums are the biggest in the world but taste of nothing. No wonder American plum pudding tastes of nothing either. I met an American once who said her main reason for coming to Europe was to remind herself what a tomato tasted of."

I said it was remarkable that, though the tomato was American, the Italians had taken it over and built a national cuisine out of it, while over three centuries the Americans had done nothing much with it except make ketchup. Somebody else said Christmas pudding was all part of that great northern European tradition which mixes fruit and everything together, and comes up with Dundee cake, Stollen cake, figgy pudding, Christmas cake, and so on, and that replacing it all with a pumpkin pie was pretty feeble, if that was the best the Americans could think of.

After that the conversation took a predictable course, what with someone saying that pumpkin only turned up at Hallowe'en, and that Hallowe'en was another new-fangled American gimmick that nobody really wanted, so before someone could say they hated trick or treating or we started a fruitless discussion of the pros and cons of Thanksgiving, I brought the whole thing back on to the straight and narrow by proposing that we should give thanks that the Americans never conquered India.

"Why?" said someone.

"Because if they had, the Americans would now be telling us how to make kedgeree," I said, "whereas it is much safer left to the British. Especially to my wife."

And we all raised our glasses of orange juice and drank to that.