(previous page, clockwise from top left) Flurys’s plum pudding, regular plum cake, almond iced plum cake, the bustling interior of Flurys. (this page, clockwise from left) Bada Din celebrations in Park Street, Anand Puri, a vintage Trincas ad, Alisha and Debra Alexander. (next page) Nahoum’s plum cake and its busy store interior while dad got us a cake from Saldanha Bakery,” food writer Rukshana A. Kapadia, Co-founder, Ammolite Ideators Food Service Consultants, fondly reminisces. Growing up in Kolkata in the 90s, some things were a given. You always shopped at Shriram Arcade or Metro Plaza, you always went to Scoop for ice cream, Mocambo or Trincas for a fancy dinner, to the clubs for Christmas and New Year parties and you always bought your cakes from Flurys and Nahoum. There is nothing that screams Christmas more than the cakes – especially something that has remained unchanged in shape and taste over the decades – the plum cake. And the celebrations are not limited to the Christian community alone. As journalist and food writer Vir Sanghvi says, “Christmas is big in Goa and other places with a large Christian community. But in Kolkata it is a secular festival. It isn’t just Christians who celebrate it. For instance, the best plum cake used to come from Nahoum, which was a Jewish bakery. Like everything else there in the days when old Mr Nahoum ran the bakery, it was a labour of love.” Baking for Bada Din For Anand Puri, the owner of the legendary Trincas, it is the Dundee cake that still holds a special place in his memory. “There used to be a lot of Christmas cakes that used to come home. The Nahoum plum cake, Dundee from Britannia, some came with sugar crusting, some with marzipan with a tinge of almond, but I always remember the Dundee cake that used to be baked upside down in a tin container and we would have it that way. It smelled like Christmas. Everyone in the family had their own way of eating it. I preferred straight from the box,” says Puri. For the city’s now tiny Anglo-Indian community, this was the time when a FRESH.DAILYPIONEER.COM • DECEMBER 2025 17
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