An exotic slice of Christmas pudding

Another Life: Amid proper concerns about waste, consumerism and what to do with all the wrapping paper (we fold ours carefully and use it around next year's presents), it is possible to overdo the angst about Christmas.

Among hints and tips on "How to Have a Green Christmas" proposed by the dublin.ie website, there is, for example, the following: "Introduce the recipient to environmentally-friendly products, which help them become greener, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs." Right on. And for the really pure at heart, this would be a good time at which to contemplate one's "ecological footprint" - the impact of one's festive fancies upon the planet's resources.

Brooding on these lines, I came to the more exotic ingredients of the Christmas pudding, shipped, flown and driven from far-off climes at great cost in energy and pollution of the air.

Did you know that most of the world's raisins are grown and dried in California from an Iranian grape, and that most of the golden ones are kept that way with sulphur dioxide, the stuff in some cheaper white wines that can give you asthma?

Such research leads at once, however, into the natural history of the Christmas pudding and thus actually sets up quite an eco-friendly frame of mind in which to request a second helping.

A mouthful of dark and fragrant crumbliness should set one's thoughts drifting, however boozily, into lush and steamy simulacra of the fern-house in the National Botanical Gardens, where sun-dappled Gauguin women with wicker baskets . . .

All right. But even to rehearse the ingredients of mixed spice, the pudding's central incense, is to realise how far back in history the trade in them has gone, and how little, today, one knows of their botany: coriander, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, mace, nutmeg, ginger, cardamom, etc.

The first of these, as it happens, with its round seeds and sweet, orangey tang is amply grown in any decent Irish summer, but all the rest need a tropical habitat.

Cinnamon, for example, is the dried inner bark of a tropical laurel, originally found in Sri Lanka but now cultivated widely from Sumatra to Brazil.

Most of what we buy as cinnamon is not the proper stuff at all but a laurel relative called cassia from China, cheaper, stronger-tasting and with a longer shelf-life. Bought as sticks, real cinnamon rolls into a single quill, while cassia scrolls in from both sides (how unobservant one has been).

I have wondered about allspice - was it a blend or something singular? It is actually ground from the dried, unripe berries of a small tree, best grown in Jamaica, looking rather like peppercorns and tasting simultaneously of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg (the Chinese call it "hundred-flavour pepper", or whatever that is in Mandarin).

Cloves are the flower buds of a tree in the myrtle family, beaten from the branches and dried in the sun. The best of them grow in the Moluccas, the original Spice Islands of Indonesia.

Here, too, are the best nutmegs, held within the apricot-like fruit of yet another rainforest tree. Nutmeg is not actually a nut but the fruit's inner kernel. Mace, much more delicately flavoured, is the net-like rind of the shell.

At the fiery heart of mixed spice is ginger, a family of bamboo-like tropical plants with a jointed rhizome (the part we use) that creeps and increases underground. The best dried ginger comes from Jamaica, the not-so-good from Nigeria and the candied kind from China, sometimes via hi-tech factories in Australia.

Ginger ale, while we're at it, was invented in Ireland in 1851 and exported from Belfast to America in vast quantities until Canada Dry came along - keep that by you for Trivial Pursuits.

Cardamom - lovely word - is another immensely tall, reedy bush in the ginger family, bearing seeds whose flavour is "warm and eucalyptine with camphorous and lemony undertones".

I associate it with sticky Arab coffee, drunk between pipes of kif on thatched Moroccan terraces (in one's youth, and yes, I inhaled and got all swimmy).

The plant has a scanty yield of seeds, is hard to harvest and does not lend itself to mass cultivation, so its price can soar towards that of saffron or vanilla.

The best cardamom is Eletteria cardamomum, native to south India but now grown extensively in the steamy mountains of Guatemala, which exports to Saudi Arabia.

Recently, or so I learn from the web, Guatemala's intention to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was hurriedly revised when the Arabs threatened a cardamom boycott.

Happy eating!