India’s timeless Christmas cake traditions

Delhi’s winters are more than just a change in the temperatures—they are a change in the rhythm of how the city breathes and thrives. Nothing, perhaps, is more apparent to this thought than the old corridors of the evergreen Connaught Place.

As I walked across CP’s A-Block in the Inner Circle last week, I caught a whiff of freshly baked plum cakes wafting out of Wenger’s—and knew exactly why December is called the ‘most wonderful time of the year.’ I hurried inside to pick up a hot-off-the-oven cake to take home and surprise my husband, who grew up in Kolkata and has the fondest memories of the Christmas cake from Nahoum’s, a Jewish bakery in New Market.

Interestingly, each of these legendary Christmas cake destinations has remained constant for a century or more. While Nahoum traces its inception back to 1902, Wenger’s has been standing tall in the Connaught Circus in Delhi since 1924—having witnessed wars, widespread strife, and the modernisation wave that has shaped us to be who we are today.

Yet, interestingly enough, the erstwhile epicentres of Calcutta and Delhi are not where the first Christmas cake is believed to have been baked. The Indian version of the original is said to have been made for the first time in Thalassery in Kerala in 1883 using cashew apple liqueur instead of traditional brandy by a local businessman named Mambally Bapu. He made the cake based on the suggestions given by Murdoch Brown, a British planter who was developing a cinnamon plantation in nearby Ancharakandy.

Crescentia’s cakes

The tastes, however, have never wavered in the rich, warm and gooey consistency. In Haryana’s Farrukhnagar, 76-year-old Crescentia Fernandes has been busy accepting orders since the month of August for her ‘world-famous’ Christmas cakes, dispatch for which started from October 31 itself.

“Our cakes go far and wide beyond Delhi to other states and countries too,” Fernandes tells me excitedly. Although mistaken to be a Goan Catholic because of her erstwhile restaurant Bernando’s (that served Goan cuisine in Delhi), Fernandes tells me that she actually hails from Fort Kochi in Kerala, and has Portuguese and Dutch ancestry. Now settled in the capital for decades, she used to work at Unicef and would make cakes during Christmas using her grandmother’s recipe—which she had adopted from a Ceylon cookery book owing to the family’s time spent in the tea gardens of present-day Sri Lanka.

“The original recipe called for only sooji, which they called rulang, but over the years I have slowly changed the recipe and used a mix of maida and sooji. Our recipe isn’t the usual cake recipe, as it has extra sweetness, extra eggs and a ratio of 5kg of soaked fruit and nuts for 1kg of flour!,” shares Fernandes.

Preparing the Consuada

In Dwarka, Anisha Sharma has been on leave from work since a week before Christmas, and has been whipping up a storm in her kitchen—baking cakes, cookies and preparing the Consuada. The latter refers to a large tray with samples of sweets made especially for the festive season. “I inherited the Christmas cake recipe from my mother, who had learnt it from one of her American colleagues during her stint at the American Consulate in New Delhi. Over the years, I have tweaked the recipe to make it my own,” Sharma shares. Her cake batter uses a generous amount of fruits and nuts soaked in rum for over a year, which lends richness to the final product.

Fernandes shares how the soaking of the fruit for a long period of time isn’t something that is rooted in traditions. “My father used to add the booze to the batter directly instead of soaking the fruit and nuts in it for years. I also follow that tradition, and also add some leftover fruit and nuts from the previous batch for some extra punch,” she adds.

Various traditions

While the heady plum cake is the bellwether of Christmas, traditions spread across India cover various other and arguably less-famous dishes, too. One such dish is Consoada (also called kuswar, depending on dialects), which features an eclectic mix of savouries and sweets put together in the spirit of the season.

Shrey Pacheco, who grew up in Delhi but has roots of his family in Goa, says, “I was usually recruited by mom to help make the kuswar. She did the essential work such as making the dough, and then we would sit on the terrace in the sun making things like namkeen, kulkuls and more. Then in the evening, we would start cooking them—and savour them on the day of Christmas,” Pacheco says in fond remembrance.

In each of these traditions, the one thread that ties it all together is clear—after all, ‘tis the season for togetherness, one that beckons warmth as we pray for the next year to be even better.