In Noumea

Plenty To Eat

Over Xmas

From Helen Rousseau,

in Noumea Noumea’s newspapers for the last two weeks of the year read like exotic cookery books, as advertisements from local hotels and restaurants tempted clients to their gastronomical Christmas and New Year’s Eve feasts.

For most Caledonians, Christmas was a quiet family occasion. Noumea children were taken downtown on Christmas Eve to see Pere Noel arrive by launch, then everyone re turned home for the sumptuous Christmas Eve dinner.

But restaurants specialising in the occasion featured oysters and other seafood, followed by pork boudin, sausage stuffed with apples, spiced goose and turkey stuffed with chest nut cream, all ending with the traditional European Christmas - log cake—flavoured with chestnuts and chocolate, and shaped like a log from the hearth.

Buy plum pudding

Those celebrating English style were able to buy plum pudding and Christmas cake imported from Aus tralia. Gourmets then had just one week to recuperate and prepare to face the New Year celebrations— the Fete of Saint Sylvestre, as it is called.

Every imaginable French delicacy was imported for the occasion—from partridge, pheasant, thrush with feathers, lark and quail to deer, rabbit and frogs’ legs.

The Nouvata Hotel offered a dinner dance at $lB per head, drinks not included. Among the special dishes advertised were New Zealand oysters, stuffed guinea-hen and the traditional mocha calendar cake, decorated to mark the New Year.

The Kings Cross restaurant down town advertised an unlimited quantity of food and drink “a gogo”, for the price of $27 per person. The food was offered with aperitives, red and white wine, champagne and liqueurs.

Onion soup, the traditional French stomach-settler, was scheduled on the programme for 3 a.m.