Christmas dinner at Friedrich Engels (122 Regents Park Rd NW1)
The following is an extract from Eduard Bernstein’s My Years of Exile (1915). Bernstein was a co-thinker of Marx and Engels who went on to be a revisionist leader of the German SPD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Bernstein
Engels was indeed a considerable fan of plum puddings. He was an enthusiastic beer drinker, particularly Pilsner but had a wine cellar. He certainly didn’t cook the Christmas dinner himself but he was also to be found in the kitchen on occasion. He was well known for his lobster salad, the recipe for which is sadly not extant
Christmas was kept by Engels after the English fashion as Charles Dickens has so delightfully described it in The Pickwick Papers. The room is decorated with green boughs of every kind, between which, in suitable places, the perfidious mistletoe peeps forth, which gives every man the right to kiss any person of the opposite sex who is standing beneath it or whom he can catch in passing. At table the principal dish is a mighty turkey, and if the exchequer will run to it this is supplemented by a great cooked ham. A few additional attractions – one of which, a sweet known as tipsy-cake, is, as the name denotes, prepared with brandy or sherry – make way for the dish of honour, the plum-pudding, which is served up, the room having been darkened, with burning rum. Each guest must receive his helping of pudding, liberally christened with good spirits, before the flame dies out. This lays a foundation which may well prove hazardous to those who do not measure their consumption of the accompanying wines.
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