ham pinned with cloves, and even that Christmas pudding dripping with hard sauce but no Christmas dinner is complete without cassava or farine pie.

It's an age-old tradition handed down by great-great grandmothers who would make their pies and pass on their recipes altering an amount of an ingredient here or there.

The cassava plant made its advent to Bermuda in 1616, journeying from the West Indies in the Edwin . It is a native of South America, where it is grown quite extensively.

"Cassava cakes, well known in the West Indies and South America, have not found the same favour in Bermuda, and the cassava is grown chiefly now for making the famous local delicacy, `cassava pie' without which no Christmas dinner would be complete to a Bermudian,'' as written in `Bermuda's Oldest Inhabitants' by Louisa Hutchings Smith.

"Making a cassava pie is quite a ceremony. Recipes vary slightly with different families, and the time honoured customs handed down to them by their great grandmothers.

"It was possibly a great-great grandmother, for cassava pie has been a delicacy in Bermuda for very many years.'' According to the Agricultural Bulletin published by the Bermuda Department of Agriculture, February is the most popular month for planting cassava though some growers plant as early as January and others as late as March.

The plant thrives best in light soil of good depth, and if this is well manured, a crop may be obtained in time for next Christmas.

Under less favourable conditions the crop will take 12 or even 15 months to give large roots.

Cassava is a main article of diet in many lands. In the villages of Ceylon it is the chief root-crop, in tropic South America it supplies a great portion of the food, and it is cultivated extensively in the West Indies, East Africa, and India.

"It is strange that in Bermuda, although the crop grows well, its use is confined to celebrations at Christmas and to less extent at Easter.

"The reason is doubtless to be found in the laborious grinding which is entailed in preparing cassava for eating and the scarcity of domestic help for such a purpose.'' The cassava plant has many names such as manihot, manioc, yuca or tapioca and it is important to know that the roots "contain such dangerous amounts of hydrocyanic acid throughout that, eaten without proper preparation, they are poisonous.

"It is remarkable that primitive American Indians devised methods, consisting of successively peeling, shredding, soaking in water, squeezing until nearly dry, and boiling in fresh water, that effectively rid the tubers of the poison and converts them into useful food.'' In fact the book "The Lucayans'' states that the cassava was made into bread by Indians and "a poisonous juice had to be extracted from the grated flour before the bread-making process could continue.

"Some Indians, weary of their enslavement in the mines of Aiti (now Haiti), drank this juice as one form of suicide.'' The old Bermuda remedy for cassava poisoning was to give the patient whale oil and soap suds to induce a vomit.

Librarian Florenz Maxwell remembers how when she was a youngster she and her sister had the yearly task of grating the cassava.

"My sister May and I would grate the cassava, that was our job. It was a tedious job.

"I remember my mother using cassava water for starch when doing clothes and some people claim they also used the cassava juice for a stomach ache.'' Mrs. Maxwell added: "My father used to grow cassava in the garden. We filled the pie with chicken, or we might have had pork.

"It was exciting to have the pie for Christmas. I love it and I cannot do without it.'' Because her mother died when she was a little girl Lucetta Williams would watch her father make cassava pies for the holidays.

"My father would make the pie and in those days we raised pigs. We did not have a lot of turkeys.

"My father would raise the pig and feed it a bran mixture to clean it out so when he killed it for Christmas it was nice fresh pork.'' Mrs. Williams added: "When my father and his sister would grow the cassava he would grate it and I would help. I would grate my finger sometimes.

"He would soak it and wring it out because people said the root was poisonous if you didn't get all the juice out.'' Mrs. Williams also said cassava and farine pie would also be made when people got married and for the Cup Match holiday.'' Evernell Davis, who spends most of the year making farine pies for her family and friends said: "Traditionally my granny did farine pie and as we grew older we had cassava, some members of my family do half and half but I stick to farine.'' Bermuda's long tradition with cassava pie cassava and farine because the warmth of their hands got the butter to cream and then as things got more modernised people used mix masters. "I enjoy cooking it so my friends have me making them all the time now, and I eat it all year around.'' Lawson Mapp remembers the ritual of killing the pig for the pie when everyone -- from he and his brothers, his grandmother and aunts -- would gather around. "I was brought up by my grandmother and near Christmas time my father's job would be to kill the pig. My uncle would bring the pig up in the morning and my grandmother and all my aunts were like ants getting things prepared. "They would boil large pots of water which they put on the pig after he was killed to get the hair off, then they would cut him up.'' Mr.

Mapp added: "We would fight over who would eat the pigs tail. The pork was used for the cassava pie. "In those days we purchased the cassava root and my grandmother would grate it and put it in a piece of flour bag and then squeeze out the juice. She had a big tank out in the yard where she would put the cassava to dry and then she would make the pie. "I loved the pie -- we couldn't wait to get into that.''