Christmas Day, 1892. In a lonely snow-whipped yurt high in the Pamir Mountains, Charles Adolphus Murray, the seventh Earl of Dunmore, did not let an outside temperature of -40C, or a lack of suet, dampen his desire for Christmas pudding.
Murray used his telescope as a rolling pin, making a “roly-poly” Christmas pudding with ingenious, if somewhat unorthodox, ingredients: “frozen yolks of six Kashgar eggs, Kirghiz flour . . . and butter from a tin of Sardines au Beurre”, mixed with locally sourced pistachios, apricots and honey.
So delighted was he with the result that he exclaimed no cook in Europe, on that very day, “could have been as proud of his Christmas Pudding as I was of mine . . . notwithstanding the slight suspicion of a flavour of sardines”. It was, as he mildly put it, a “new departure in Christmas Puddings”.