PAXO'S STUFFING

     “Going home, are you?” said the Uber driver as we bowled over Waterloo Bridge towards Hackney.

       “I’m actually staying with friends,” I told him. Then, because I have apparently acquired the Californian habit of distributing personal information willy-nilly to one and all, “I live in Los Angeles.”

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       The driver pondered this dubiously.

       “You don’t sound American,” he objected after a moment.

       “I grew up in London,” I excused myself. “But I live in Los Angeles now.”

       For a few moments, he continued to ponder.

       “Los Angeles,” he said then. “That’s a fair way from here, isn’t it?”

       “It is,” I agreed.

       He nodded in assent, then puffed out his cheeks feelingly.

       “I’ll bet you miss Paxo’s stuffing, don’t you?” he concluded.

       I found myself bereft of a response to this. Dearly as I love living in Los Angeles, there are of course parts of British life that I miss from time to time. First, and most obviously, I miss loved ones; also, at different times and to differing extents, there is the particular slant of grey-white light on North London mornings; the occasional (but not too frequent) sudden rain shower; a gaggle of rosy-cheeked, newly-released schoolchildren bursting jubilantly onto the bus in the afternoon; buying Private Eye on the day it’s published; lilacs in the spring; Welsh lamb and Jersey Royal potatoes in the summer.

       To be perfectly frank – and while we must remember, of course, the age-old piece of wisdom that you should never say never – the day has yet to dawn when I will wake up in the Los Angeles sunshine, pour a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice from our neighbors’ tree, and sigh, “Oh, but what wouldn’t I give to be sitting down to a plate of Paxo’s dried and reconstituted boxed bread stuffing for dinner tonight?”

        “I love a bit of Paxo’s, me,” said the driver. He nodded again, confidently. “I’m sure you do too, don’t you?”

      To be clear, there’s nothing in the world that I actually have against Paxo’s, the venerable British brand of boxed stuffing for meat which since its invention in 1901 has been a standby for many a harried cook at Christmas time. Like many of my generation, I grew up with it: it had been a staple of my Christmas family kitchen, along with roast potatoes, mince pies, and a nuclear war breaking out at around 11.00 in the morning, and my late and sainted mother would not have considered serving the Christmas turkey without it. Paxo’s comes in just the one flavor, Sage & Onion, and you make it by adding boiling water, letting it sit for five minutes for the moisture to soak in, and then carrying on with it as you would with any other more arduously prepared stuffing dish. Although I can’t in all honesty pretend to remember the taste today (I’d probably suggest not getting too excited, however), I do remember enjoying it at the time, not least because it signified there was a celebration afoot.

        But cooking styles change, and these days, like most modern home cooks, when I have stuffing to add to a roast, I will make my own. When I cook a Christmas turkey, I make two sorts, a conventional herb version, with torn sourdough bread, lots of fresh herbs, an indecent amount of butter and maybe some chopped apple if I’m feeling controversial, and a slightly more pizzazz-y alternative which I invented myself, with cornbread, sausages, marsala and pine nuts. My secret weapon for both is the homemade stock which I use as a moistener – leftover bones that have been simmered on the stovetop for two days until they are almost pure jelly and then pushed through a chinoise, which takes forever, requires a right arm of pure steel, and is hell on a plate to clean up after, but the results are worth it.

       If our friends Vanessa and Rob join us, Vanessa will bring her special vegetarian version with mushrooms and pecans, and a treat for the taste buds it is too. Vanessa and I have been good friends for more years than I can count by now. She’s married to Mr. Los Angeles’ best friend, and as a happy and congenial group we four have shared good times and bad, spent family meals, holidays, and occasional vacations together: we have laughed, meditated and mourned, and, since Vanessa is also English, she and I have inevitably exchanged memories of growing up in England. We have traded tales of schooldays, of siblings, of TV shows and skipping rhymes and train delays and seaside outings and holiday traditions: there is, by now, almost no part of each other’s English childhood that we do not know.

       I suppose that, at some point along the way, we might have mentioned Paxo’s stuffing, because there would be no reason not to; but if we did, I can’t for the life of me think what we would have said about it.

       “Oh, well,” said the driver philosophically. “I’ll bet you can get it in Los Angeles too, can’t you?”

       “I’m sure you probably can,” I said.

       There is an English food shoppe – and, yes, that is how they spell it – in Santa Monica, attached to the justly popular and thriving Ye Olde King’s Head English pub, or, presumably, pubbe. The shoppe sells tea, and Twiglets, and Sarson’s malt vinegar and Jacob’s cream crackers, and I have a sweet-natured neighbor who sings in a local women’s choir and comes to visit our cat when we are out of town, who morphs into a ravening wildebeest should I manage to score there a box of Tunnock’s tea cakes. The people who run the shoppe are altogether delightful, and it might very well be that they sell Paxo’s stuffing there along with everything else. But since it has never once occurred to me to look for it, I really couldn’t say for sure.

       The driver ruminated for a while, and had an inspiration.

       “Here’s a thought,” he said. “You could get some here and take it back with you when you go, couldn’t you?”

       “I suppose I could,” I said.

       I do take things back to America with me when I’ve visited Britain. Invariably, I take too many books; I also take cotton underwear from Marks & Spencer; a box of vicious-tasting but potent throat lozenges from Boots called VocalZone which Bette Midler once told me Tom Jones had recommended to her, and I figure if it’s good enough for Las Vegas legends it’s good enough for singing in the shower; Hibiscrub anti-microbial skin cleanser for Mr. Los Angeles, who has a thing about germs and sometimes wonders how he ended up married to, well, me; and that same Mr. Los Angeles once had me chasing the length and breadth of London in search of a shaving cream called Murdock’s until at last I found it, looked at the price tag, and promptly lost it again. I had never yet included Paxo Sage & Onion stuffing in my haul; but then I had never before this had it suggested to me that I might.

       “That’s what you need to do then, love,” said the Uber driver. He had cheered himself up immensely. “Pop into Tesco’s this afternoon, while it’s still on your mind, buy a couple of boxes, and pack them away before you forget. Then you’ll know they’re there so you won’t have to worry about them, will you?”

      “I certainly won’t,” I said.

       The driver nodded in satisfaction.

       “That’s you sorted then,” he said. “Believe you me, you’ll thank me on Christmas Day. Well, it wouldn’t be Christmas without Paxo’s, would it?”

       I didn’t like to point out to him that, at the time when we were having the conversation, it was the middle of July.