Homemade Holidays : An Exile in New York, a military brat, a mom who poached a tree. . .and the search for figgy pudding. ‘Tis the season to remember. With recipes. : Miracle on East 92nd Street

And then there was the Christmas I was broke in New York City.

OK, I wasn’t really broke. I had money . . . in a bank in California. But as anyone who has ever tried it knows, cashing a personal check for $50 in New York City is essentially like applying for a first mortgage on the basis of character alone.

The reasons I was cash-poor were Christmas shopping, taxis and almsgiving. This was back in the Reagan Administration, when the proliferation of street people was just becoming intense. I had never been confronted by so many homeless and hungry men and women. Walking along Madison Avenue, I found myself handing out dollar bills, sometimes three or four to a block. I wasn’t exactly flush to begin with, so I was down to $10 cash before I knew it.

Still, I had a roof over my head, a five-story brownstone on East 92nd Street that belonged to my friend Lily. Lily was off in Switzerland, but knowing I could never afford a New York City hotel room, she offered the use of her home. I remember reveling a little in the irony of my situation: dead broke in a fabulous house.

There was some food in the cupboards, pasta and canned tomatoes, which Lily’s 22-year-old stepson and I cooked up for dinner. I wasn’t going to starve, but I wasn’t going to have much feasting on Christmas either.

Or so I thought. Early Christmas Eve the buzzer sounded. I dressed and ran down three flights of stairs. When I got to the door, Matthew had already answered it.

“It was the groceries you ordered,” he said and pointed to two boxes on the kitchen table.

“I didn’t order any groceries,” I said.

“Well, somebody did.”

I looked into one of the boxes. There was a turkey, vegetables in bags, frozen pie shells, some canned goods--cranberry sauce and pumpkin. The invoice had our address on it.

“I didn’t order this,” I said again.

“Maybe Lily did,” Matthew said.

“You think so?” I wondered. Canned cranberry sauce and frozen pie shells didn’t sound like Lily to me. Still, if I were buying a whole Christmas dinner for someone, I might try to make it easy for them.

“Well, I don’t care who sent it,” Matthew said. He picked up his briefcase and headed for the door. “I’m just glad you know how to cook.”

In addition to the 12-pound turkey and canned goods, there were two loaves of sliced whole-wheat bread, a pound of pork sausage, a box of cornmeal. Onions. Butter. Celery. Eggs. A quart of oysters. And a big bag of chestnuts. There was probably $10 worth of chestnuts. I loved chestnuts. But Lily didn’t know I loved chestnuts. We’d never talked about chestnuts. My best friend back home in California knew I was crazy about chestnuts. Maybe she had ordered this dinner--but how? I couldn’t figure it out.

As I was putting the groceries away, Lily’s housekeeper, Kathleen, arrived. She was a friendly, practical woman from Jamaica. I went on and on to her about who could have sent the groceries. If not Lily, maybe it was Matthew’s father. Or one of Matthew’s friends. But who would order a big bag of chestnuts for a 22-year-old who didn’t know how to cook?

Kathleen shook her head and told me to stop trying to figure out who sent the Christmas dinner. “If whoever it was wanted you to know who they were, they woulda told you, now, wouldn’t they?”

That afternoon, I walked over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sooner or later, I’m convinced, you could meet everyone you know on the steps to the Metropolitan Museum. Once, I was with a woman who ran into her eighth-grade teacher from Eugene, Ore. there.

This Christmas Eve, I ran into Herbert. Herbert was a poet from Yugoslavia. He had no plans for Christmas and was looking a little droopy, so I invited him to come over the next day and help us eat the mysterious, miraculous food. Herbert said he’d help me cook.

When I got home from the museum, Kathleen was just leaving.

“A man called about some oysters,” she said. “He says you got his oysters.”

“Me?” I didn’t know what to think. I’d gotten a lot more than oysters. “What did you tell him?”

“I said to him, ‘Don’t go hollering at me. I don’t know nothing about no oysters.’ ”

“But we did get oysters,” I said.

“I know that,” Kathleen said, “but what makes you think you got his oysters?”

It was past 5. The grocer’s was closed. It was too late to do anything about any oysters.

Herbert showed up bright and early the next morning, in time to help stuff the turkey. For the dressing, I debated between using the whole-wheat bread or making corn bread for the stuffing.

Herbert made my decision. He may have originally come from Slovenia, but he’d lived for two years in Chapel Hill, N.C. A woman there had taught him to make spoon bread. When he saw the box of cornmeal, that’s what he thought about: his lost romance and spoon bread.

So we made the dressing with the whole-wheat bread, sausage, oysters and chestnuts. The chestnuts were the hard part. We had to score each one, put them on baking sheets and roast them in a hot oven until they puffed up. Despite our incisions, a few exploded all over the oven. The next trick was to get the husks off before the nuts cooled back down and stuck to the meat again. We singed our fingers and probably ate more chestnuts than actually wound up inside the turkey.

Matthew occasionally stuck his head into the kitchen. “I’m sure glad you guys know how to cook,” he’d say.

We ate at 2 in the afternoon. Herbert, Matthew and me.

There was turkey. And dressing, which Matthew thought was weird because of the oysters. Pumpkin pie. And this lovely, custard-y, fluffy, crusty-topped substance that was like corn bread without the crumbs, corn bread gone to heaven, the soul of corn bread. It was so good it made Herbert sad about his old girlfriend all over again. Or maybe he was just feeling the way anybody feels during holidays away from home with people you barely know; a sense of fate grinding away and pulling you with it to all sorts of odd places and circumstances and alliances.

Or maybe Herbert was just a sadsack. In my opinion, the spoon bread was worth a failed romance. I still make a bowl of it sometime every Christmas season. The rest of the year, it’s too damn fattening.

When Lily came home after New Year’s, I thanked her for the Christmas dinner.

She said: “What Christmas dinner?”

“Didn’t you order all that food for us?”

“What food?”

The next day, when she went to the market, the grocer was waiting for her. He admitted that he’d sent the food to the wrong address--but we’d eaten it! He probably would have let the whole thing go, Lily said, except he’d given us his last jar of oysters and the man who ordered them never got any. He was very upset. He made the grocer upset.

To make peace, Lily agreed to pay for half the order. She wouldn’t hear of my paying her back.

“It was such a good idea to buy you and Matthew Christmas dinner,” she said. “I wish I’d thought of it.”

*

It’s a good idea to time this dish so that it comes out of the oven when everyone is already seated at the table. As with many sadsacks, it can look fabulous only for about five minutes before it starts to slump.

SADSACK SPOON BREAD

1 cup cornmeal

4 cups milk

1/2 cup butter, cut up

1 1/2 cups sharp cheese (sharp Cheddar, provolone)

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

4 egg yolks, lightly beaten

4 egg whites

Place cornmeal in saucepan. Stirring constantly with whisk, add 1 cup milk and turn heat to medium. Slowly add remaining 3 cups milk, constantly stirring until mixture reaches boil. Add butter and stir until blended. Turn off heat. Add cheese, salt and cayenne pepper. Keep stirring. Slowly stir in egg yolks.

Beat egg whites until peaks are just stiff. Do not overbeat. Fold cornmeal mixture into egg whites. Pour into heated and buttered oven-proof bowl, round casserole or ceramic souffle dish. Bake 35 to 45 minutes, until top is nicely browned. Serve immediately, before it deflates. Makes 10 servings.

Each serving contains about:

280 calories; 507 mg sodium; 159 mg cholesterol; 19 grams fat; 16 grams carbohydrates; 11 grams protein; 0.10 gram fiber.