A three-act farce

Christmas is the cross food writers have to bear. I'm sorry about the religious solecism, but Easter is a piece of cake - usually simnel-cake -compared to Christmas. Editors always decide that this is the edition when food and wine writers should earn their weight in advertising. The rest of the year you tap away between the crossword and the property ads; nobody even reads your copy. But at Christmas you're called into the office and told there is going to be an extra five pages to fill, and then the editor leans forward and says the same thing every year: `This year I want it to be really different.' They want Christmas to be different in what way?

My worst experience was the international Christmas. `What we want', the editor explained, `is anecdotes and recipes from Christmases around the globe.' I obliged and got carpeted. `This is so European, so white, so unimaginative!' she screamed. `What about China, India, the Middle East? What do they eat for Christmas, for Christ's sake?' `For Christ's sake, nothing. They aren't Christian.' `What's being Christian got to do with it?'

The truth is that Christmas dinner is potentially the worst meal of the year, unless you are an American, in which case Thanksgiving is worse. Convention, sentimentality and the Germans have contrived to invent a hybrid meal that flouts good taste, digestion and the resources of even a well-appointed kitchen. For a start the modern turkey is a hideous bird. It doesn't matter if it's bronze, black, white, freerange or had a public school education, no amount of tricks and stuffings and handy one-to-ten tips is going to make it taste of anything other than turkey. Then there are the 27 side-dishes and bits and pieces that have to be produced with it: potatoes and sprouts and carrots and parsnips and chestnuts and sausages and bacon and bread sauce and cranberry sauce and gravy. And that is before you even get inside the bloody thing; then there's more sausagemeat, and sage and onion.... No one, not even Keith Floyd, would invent that as a main dinner course from scratch. There are far too many strident flavours that contradict one another and the textures are all the same.

Then there's the pudding -- boiled fruit with flamed brandy and brandy butter and custard, and then a stilton and tangerines and preserved dates and mince-pies and Christmas cake. If you look at the recipes for cake, pie and pudding, you will notice that they are all identical, give or take a raising agent and some flour. Now why would you want to eat three concoctions of dried fruit that all taste the same, let alone make them when they are about as timeconsuming as anything you can do in the kitchen? Any food writer who tells you that all that and a foie gras or smoked salmon starter can be made to taste nice and be prepared with ease whilst drinking champagne, sherry, claret, cognac and Drambuie is lying through his teeth, or more precisely through your teeth.

The truth is that anyone who knows anything about cooking wouldn't touch Christmas dinner with a ten-foot Christmas tree. That leaves the rest of you who gird your loins and get out of a warm bed at four in the morning to stick your hand up a cold dead bird's bum and try to fit 27 pans onto four gas-rings. This is the worst bit about Christmas dinner: it's cooked by people who don't do anything more demanding in their kitchens than open a packet and throw the odd plate from Boxing Day to Hallowe'en, but come December suddenly decide to climb an epicurean Everest. And you don't get a practice run - it's not as if all these ingredients are familiar; they only come out once a year.

And yet and yet - even as I write this it rings hollow. Every year I say it's going to be beef or pork or goose (a stupid bird that will only feed three - the most pointless number of diners) or venison or anything else followed by apple pie or trifle, but I know that when it actually comes to it I'll lose my nerve and, just like the foolish folk who don't know any better, I'll be flogging round the shops on the 22nd looking for a bronze bird and a proper stilton and be up until three a.m. picking through currants, because if you eat anything else it's just another day and Christmas isn't just another day, it's Christmas. And if I don't have chipolatas and chestnuts and mincemeat it will haunt me for the rest of the year, like the ghost of Tiny Tim, whispering that somehow I've cheated, that there is unfinished business, that the natural order of things has been usurped.

There is one good thing about Christmas dinner and the appalling mess and work and the people you've got to eat it with: it proves that God has a sense of humour. I mean, who else's deity would contrive to celebrate the holiest day of the year that way? Hindus get lentils, Muslims get fresh air, the Jews have boiled eggs in salt water. We Christians get a three-act farce where you have to wear a paper hat.

Actually, there is one thing you should eat at Christmas; it's the original fast food. It only takes a second but is harder to prepare for than anything: a sliver of unleavened bread and a sip of wine. Oddly, in all the Christmas articles I've had to write, this is the first time I've thought to recommend it.

PS: I was flicking through John Gay, the way one does, and I came across a poetic fable called `The Turkey and the Ant'. Two of the stanzas go:

But cursed man on turkey preys

And Christmas shortens all our days . . .

From the low peasant to the lord

The turkey smokes on ev'ry board.

Now I had always imagined that turkey as Christmas fare was post-Dickens, replacing Tiny Tim's goose or pork, but Gay was writing at the beginning of the 18th century. I'm amazed, and would be interested to know what the earliest record of turkeys and Christmas in Britain is. A goose liver for whoever comes up with the earliest documented evidence.

Copyright Spectator Nov 8, 1997
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