In the lead-up to Christmas 2012, while living in Los Angeles, I set my heart on plum pudding. For once, I was going to eat the hot steamed dessert in the winter (admittedly a warm winter), when it made sense, rather than in Australia’s sweltering summer.
Australia has adopted plum pudding, like so many things, from the British — and frosty British Christmases are perfect for a hot dessert. Plum pudding, for the sadly uninitiated, is a delicious steamed caky pudding made with the least delicious-sounding collection of ingredients (and no plums): bread crumbs, raisins, candied citrus peel, beef fat. Traditional recipes have you mix all this together and hang it in a cloth for a month, and then steam it, soak it in booze and light it on fire. It’s fantastic, I promise!
The greatest obstacle to making plum pudding in the United States is suet, a key ingredient. Suet — hard beef fat found around the animal’s kidneys — is not so easy to come by in Los Angeles, it turns out. Now that I’m back living in Australia, suet is easy to come by, but the idea of eating plum pudding in this heat seems insane.
Plum pudding is a delicious steamed, caky pudding made with the least delicious-sounding collection of ingredients — and no plums. CreditClubphoto/Getty Images
Australian holiday cooking is full of these kinds of contradictions: traditions borrowed from different climates, where the December feast is designed as respite from the long, cold winter. But Christmas here also includes wonderful divergences from conventional European cooking — some that acquiesce to our December heat, and some that spring from our diversity.
Victor Liong, the chef and an owner of Lee Ho Fook in Melbourne, enjoys the variety of holiday parties one might experience over a few years in Australia. “I have celebrated with many different friends,” Mr. Liong wrote in an email. “The parties have ranged from lobster rolls and plum pudding with magnums of Champagne with my Polish business partner’s family, to a Sri Lankan and Indian curry buffet with a glazed ham as a centerpiece at my best friend’s mum’s house, to a Lebanese backyard shawarma barbecue party where we had Street’s Viennetta ice-cream cake for dessert and drank really old port.”
Mr. Liong’s Chinese-Malaysian-Australian family has also adopted the British-Australian Boxing Day, the day-after-Christmas celebration when extended families get together.
His family grills satays on that holiday: “Mum and my two sisters skewer chicken, lamb, beef, gizzards, livers and hearts and marinate them quite traditionally in a Malaysian-style satay spice, and the boys set up the charcoal and grill it,” Mr. Liong wrote. They prepare a late lunch, served with pressed rice, peanut sauce, chunks of cucumber and red onion. “It gets quite competitive: My brother, Arthur, is the reigning satay-eating champion.”
Ben Shewry, the chef and owner of Attica, in Melbourne, said his own family traditions were typical of Australian Christmases in that “as with most mainstream things in this part of the world, they are both confusing (mostly from a climate perspective) and based on immigration.” There is ham and stuffing on Mr. Shewry’s Christmas table and, “like most Australian households, a lot of shellfish.” But the main attraction is lasagna, which became his family’s special-occasion meal not thanks to any Italian heritage but because his “Canadian grandmother loved Garfield,” the gluttonous comic-strip cat.
In a reversal of my suet-in-L. A. problem, Palisa Anderson — an owner of Chat Thai, Boon Cafe in Sydney and Boon Luck Farm in Northern New South Wales — remembers trekking through the streets of snowy London, trying to find passion fruit for a Christmas Pavlova. Ms. Anderson lived in London, New York and Tokyo over the years, before returning to Sydney, and the one Australian Christmas institution she couldn’t relinquish was the summer Pavlova, a staple on many holiday tables.
In Tokyo she discovered a delightful alternative to a seasonal tart summer fruit: yuzu. These days she grows yuzu on Boon Luck Farm, and it’s become a regular part of her Pavlova recipe.
Ms. Anderson also recalls Australian family Christmases that had influences from all over the map. “My aunt’s Norwegian husband used to always bring the turkey that no one ever ate,” she said. “The next day my mother would use it for a stir-fry that her Chinese-Thai housekeeper used to make for her family growing up, with dark soy sauce and lots of ginger.”
These days Boon Cafe is open on Christmas, serving its regular menu of fiery Thai food and one important addition. Brent Templeton, the restaurant’s pastry chef, is a New Zealander who married a Sri Lankan woman, and he makes a Sri Lankan version of Christmas fruit cake, which has a distinctive tropical note from the addition of pineapple.
Another Australian carrying on antipodean customs in Los Angeles is the chef Curtis Stone. “Christmas is a big beach day in Oz,” Mr. Stone said. “We’ll start the day with our feet in the sand, and then get back to the house to feast. The first course is typically a grand spread of seafood, and I maintain that tradition whether I go back to Australia or stay in Los Angeles.”
The cold seafood platter is common across the country for many families. There may be some Southern Italian influence there from the Christmas Eve Feast of the Seven Fishes, but the custom also undoubtedly stems from the weather and the fact that Christmas is often a beachy holiday for Australians.
My recent Australian Christmases have been spent at the beach with my father and stepmother. There is a ham, and some sliced turkey breast, but the main attraction of the day is platters of chilled prawns and oysters, washed down with lots of very cold Champagne.
Plum pudding? It’s been way too hot. This year, maybe a yuzu Pavlova.