A Very British Christmas

by Rhodri Marsden

  Ards, Christmas 1996

  I used to work as an environmental health officer. Part of that work involved sampling food to make sure there was nothing in it that there shouldn’t be. One Christmas there was a scare that turkeys were being given steroids called Angel Dust to pump them up, and as part of a national sampling programme I had to go out and try to find the biggest turkey I could.

  I found it on a farm south-east of Belfast. It must have been well over 30lb. I drove a Mini Metro at the time and could barely get it in the car. I took it to an abattoir to get it prepared for testing, but we only needed the liver to do the test. So they removed that, and I was left with this massive turkey. I didn’t know what to do with it. I took it to my parents in a panic. This was right before Christmas, and everyone had already got a turkey. But my mother wasn’t going to waste it. She said we’ll cook it and freeze it. But it wouldn’t fit in the oven, we had to cut it into pieces to get it in. Yeah, that year there was a lot of turkey going on for a very long time. I didn’t even wait for the steroid results, I just assumed it would be fine.

  K. S.

  How to deal with this gargantuan bit of poultry is a matter of great national concern. In the mid 1990s the British Turkey Federation set up a helpline called the British Turkey Information Service in order to prevent mounting panic as Christmas approached. ‘People used to ring up,’ says Claire Hall, whose job it was to man the phones, ‘and ask how big a turkey they’d need for sixteen people, or how long it would take to cook a turkey of a certain size. Twenty years later I can still remember that it’s 15 minutes a pound plus 15 minutes. The helpline operated all year round, and if you rang at any other time of the year you’d still get me. Although in the summer I’d get people ringing and asking if they needed a visa, and I’d have to explain that we dealt with a different kind of turkey.’

  In 1975, terrifying TV cook Fanny Cradock made a series of hectoring 15-minute programmes about the correct way to make Christmas classics, and turkey was the first out of the traps. ‘This curious pinching movement that I’m doing here,’ she said while pinching the skin of the turkey in a curious way, ‘isn’t just silly. It’s to loosen the skin so I can put my hand underneath…’ Fanny’s slightly sinister approach to the ‘dry bird’ problem involved pushing mushrooms and bacon into the cavity she’d created, but these days you’ll see conflicting advice from different celebrity chefs. Nigella Lawson advocates soaking the whole thing in brine overnight, Gordon Ramsay suggests liberal use of butter, Heston Blumenthal puts his in an oven at only 130°C, Delia Smith uses kitchen foil, and Nigel Slater turns his upside down. Families may scorn advice from the mainstream media and stick to their own method, from placing it carefully in a barbecue under an umbrella in the garden, to bottling out and buying a boneless turkey crown, a joyless lozenge that can be solemnly divided into precisely equal units of protein.

  “Come on, darling, I saw one being prepared on Saturday Kitchen. Apparently they taste like chicken.”

  Anyone who works in British food publishing will, at some point, have made an effort to promote goose as a tradition of equal standing to turkey, mainly because they’re sick of trying to come up with new spins on turkey. But it’s nowhere near as commonplace as they make it sound, and membership of the Goose Fan Club remains stubbornly and persistently low. Chicken, thanks to its ubiquity during the rest of the year, feels like a bit of a cop out – although it’s worth noting that in Japan they’ve managed to successfully promote the idea of KFC at Christmas as the nearest thing to a Western roast dinner. Japanese citizens queue around the block for a ‘Kentucky Christmas dinner’ package for their family on 25 December, but don’t bother trying it over here because KFC is shut.

  Glasgow, Christmas 2006

  I was really looking forward to spending Christmas with my then girlfriend. We’d arranged to go to Paisley to spend it with her family, but on Christmas morning we were waiting for them to pick us up when we got a call to say that they’d all been struck down with a vomiting bug. So we were stuck in our flat, and we’d made no preparations for Christmas at all. No food, no presents, nothing. And we’d only just moved in, so we didn’t even have a television. But the situation wasn’t hopeless. We were a young couple, so there was that romantic thing of making do in difficult circumstances. Everything’s fine, because you’re together.

  We had a drink in a local pub, which was bleak. It was just a row of depressed men sat silently at the bar drinking spirits. We left to find something to eat, and found a corner shop that was open. At the bottom of the freezer there were two TV dinners, roast chicken dinners. We said OK, we can have a pretend Christmas dinner! We put them in the oven, and ate them on our knees, because we didn’t have a table. But I turned out to be allergic to it. I went bright red and started wheezing and sweating. That was the point where it tipped over into farce, and I started to find it hilarious, but my girlfriend didn’t. We split up a few months later.

  A. M.

  British people who inhabit an insular, meaty world will often express bafflement at the idea of a vegetarian or vegan Christmas, imagining them roaming country lanes with tears streaming down their faces while they search in vain for nuts and berries. But asking what over a million British vegetarians eat for Christmas dinner is as ridiculous a question as ‘What on earth do lesbians DO in bed?’ It takes virtually no imagination to replace the Christmas turkey with all kinds of other food, whether it’s nut roast with cranberries, parsnip roulade, aubergine cassoulet, seitan roast, mushroom bourguignon, veggie haggis, veggie wellington, veggie pie… It’s not a problem. It really isn’t. The list of options is a mile long, but overthinking and worrying excessively about it can result in culinary disaster.

  Hertfordshire, Christmas 2011

  I spent Christmas at my boyfriend’s parents, and it was the first year I’d spent it away from my own family. When I arrived there weren’t even any decorations. ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ I thought. ‘What’s going on?’ I wondered if they’d put decorations up before going to bed on Christmas Eve so we’d walk into a magical wonderland on Christmas morning, but no. However, my boyfriend reassured me that we’d all be having a special vegetarian Christmas dinner, because I was vegetarian, and his mum had been practising it.

  It turned out to be spaghetti with vegetarian meatballs and hardly any sauce. For everyone! I remember thinking, ‘Maybe this is just a starter’, not that spaghetti as a Christmas starter is remotely normal – but it wasn’t. That was it. I don’t think I managed to hide my disappointment, and I felt like such a spoilt brat. I remember going to the toilet and texting my sister saying, ‘They’re doing everything completely wrong!’

  C. A.

  We tend to forget that there’s absolutely no need to be bound to any Christmas food traditions.41 It’s totally up to us what we eat, and other foods are widely available. All it takes to make the switch to something more (or less) exotic is some consensus within the room, so people aren’t suddenly threatening each other in a tense situation over salmon en croute. ‘On Christmas Eve we always do veal Milanese and spaghetti,’ says chef and food writer Gizzi Erskine. ‘I’ve no idea how that developed. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but that’s how it is now, and on Christmas Eve we all absolutely crave it.’

  Leeds, Christmas 2012

  It was always just me and my son and my dad for Christmas. The year my dad died I didn’t feel very Christmassy, so I told my son he could choose whatever he wanted for Christmas lunch. He was 10 years old. We went around Marks & Spencer and I told him he could pick anything, which in retrospect was a bit of a high-risk strategy. He decided that he wanted hot dogs and popcorn, so that’s what we did. The following year he asked if we could do it again, and now we do it every year. It makes things much less stressful, and actually I love it. My only fear is that when he grows up he’ll say, ‘Oh, I remember those Christmases sitting there with my mum drinking cava and with only hot dogs and popcorn to eat.’ I hope he tells every
one that it was his idea.

  S. H.

  But consensus within the family isn’t always easy to come by.

  Surrey, Christmas 2007

  My wife’s family are very English, traditional, churchy folk. Every Sunday they have lots of people from the church coming round for lunch. The best way of doing this cheaply is to get a big turkey, so over the course of the year they’d have dozens of turkey roast dinners, and at some point they decided to do something different on Christmas Day. They developed a system where everyone nominates ideas for lunch. If there are ten people coming, each of those people will be asked a month or two in advance to nominate two dishes. Lasagne, Thai curry, anything they like. That list of twenty is then circulated, and everyone votes for their top three, and when the top three are established there’s another vote for the winner. It takes a few weeks, and there’s a lot of scheming of how to get your favourite option chosen.

  The first Christmas I spent with them, I didn’t realise how seriously they take it and that the whole point is to avoid having turkey. So I nominated a traditional Christmas lunch, turkey and all the trimmings. My mum was there too and she backed me up. We ended up winning. We must have had backup from some other members of the family, but because it was a secret ballot we don’t know who. Afterwards I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t got into the spirit of it and didn’t choose something weird. But, you know, it’s the only day I get to have a Christmas lunch.

  F. H.

  Traditions have to start somewhere, and it’s worth remembering that our turkey ’n’ sprouts combo doesn’t date from any earlier than the mid nineteenth century. The first appearance of Brussels sprouts in a British cookery book was in 1845, in Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery For Private Families, where she advocates boiling them for just 8–10 minutes. Quite how we developed the British habit of boiling them for close to half an hour to drain them of all nutrients isn’t clear, but thankfully we seem to be emerging from that dark era. ‘We used to boil them to death and they were disgusting,’ says Gizzi Erskine. ‘Now we know that if we parboil them and then stir-fry them with bacon and chestnuts then they’re wonderful. But you don’t have to be in tune with cookery magazines to make a great Christmas lunch. In fact it pisses me off when people make too much effort to change it up – you know, adding spices to roast potatoes or whatever. Just give me a roast potato! And make sure there’s bread sauce on the table, otherwise I’ll just walk out.’

  It’s quite a task to bring all the elements of a traditional Christmas dinner together, particularly if it’s for more than four or five people. It’s safe to say that the average kitchen isn’t always set up for that level of catering; historian Martin Johnes informs us that in the 1930s gas cookers were being sold to families on the specific promise that it would make cooking on Christmas Day far less arduous – but it’s always a challenge, particularly if cooking doesn’t come naturally to you.

  My mum is a terrible cook, she has no instinct at all. She’s good at baking cakes, but when it comes to any savoury stuff she’s dreadful. My dad used to do all the cooking, but when they got divorced she became in charge of Christmas dinner and it was only then that we realised. There will always be something raw, and everything is always stone cold because she decants everything into bowls and it sits there for ages. One year she bought a chicken instead of a turkey – which was bad enough – but when she took it out of the fridge it had gone off and stank so badly we had to have the windows open, even though it was raining. Another year she set fire to the potatoes, and the year after that there were no potatoes at all because she’d forgotten to buy any.

  But there is such tremendous goodwill towards her and her efforts to make Christmas dinner, to the extent that we’d be disappointed if it was nice. And it’s hilarious the way she deliberately doesn’t get anything pre-made – I mean, anyone sensible would bite the bullet and spend extra money on easy options, but no. Fortunately she finds it funny. It’s like we’re putting her through a test that she’s doomed to fail.

  E. K., Essex

  “Well, this is nice, isn’t it.”

  The scale of the challenge of preparing Christmas lunch without screwing it up can cause great stress in some households. I remember the year that a mishap with my sister’s oven meant that the potatoes sat in there at room temperature for about half an hour, getting neither hot nor crispy. The self-imposed 2 p.m. Christmas lunch deadline was approaching fast. As the mistake was noticed and we wrestled with the oven’s manual, my concerned father muttered under his breath, ‘I don’t believe this is happening.’ Fortunately the problem was solved and lunch got back on track, but this is the kind of pressure we put upon ourselves and each other. ‘I’ve seen Christmas dinner eaten in grim silence because of the stress of getting it ready,’ says Times columnist Janice Turner. ‘No one is very jolly. “Have you done the stuffing?” “I can’t believe you’ve forgotten the pigs in blankets!” and so on.’

  One option, for those who have the money and can’t stand the heat of the kitchen, is to eat out. Unlike the rest of the year, when restaurants are often begging for our custom, the few that are open on Christmas Day tend to be massively oversubscribed, so desperate is the need of some families to avoid dealing with the culinary workload. But the meals we eat in restaurants are different to the ones we eat at home – not just because the food’s made by a few people lurking around the corner dressed in white, but because the whole mood is different. On Christmas Day that difference is accentuated; the slightly unrestrained behaviour you might display at home is reined in by an environment where other people might be watching or listening. You feel inhibited, and if you happen to possess typically British personality traits, you feel completely unable get up and do a stupid dance. Having said all that, it’s a relief to have someone else tackle the washing-up. At home the temptation might be to jettison all crockery and cutlery into a skip, but that course of action doesn’t come cheap.

  Every other year I have to spend Christmas with my in-laws. My mother-in-law has trouble tasting things – she has anosmia or something – so the entire meal is always sweet. Meat stuffed with apricots, apple sausages, you name it. Even the potatoes are always mashed with sweet potatoes, and then smothered with maple syrup. It’s so weird.

  H. G., Crewe

  Sugar and spice pervades the British Christmas in a way that salad certainly doesn’t. This represents a weird hangover from a time when both sugar and spice were synonymous with wealth. ‘Back in the day, the Dutch East India company made spices like nutmeg and cloves very difficult to get hold of,’ says Emma Grazette, author of the book Spice Trip, ‘so they became really valuable. Wearing a nutmeg grater around your neck was like flashing around an iPhone, it was a real symbol of status. So you’d use those spices in times of indulgence, like Christmas. It’s the same with sugar; if you had lots of sweet things on the table, you were doing alright.’

  Mixed spice is no longer expensive – you can get 30g dead cheap and it’ll last ages – but the aroma still tends to trigger Christmassy sentiments and celebratory feelings. Weirdly, dried fruit has a similar effect. Sultanas no longer represent extravagance, because we have global airfreight and we don’t need to dry out fruit to stop it rotting. But the festive habit still lingers. Christmas cake feels extravagant, mulled wine feels warming, and comforting, mince pies make us think, ‘Whey-hey!’

  South Yorkshire, Christmas2000

  One Christmas my dad made two batches of mince pies, and for some reason he put weed into one batch. He brought them out to the table on two separate plates and gave me the wink to let me know which were the space pies, if I wanted one. We all sat around the table playing a game – I really can’t remember which one, but I guess that’s the nature of getting high on space pies.

  My dad engineered it so that my mum had the normal pies, but my grandma, my mum’s mum, took one from the wrong batch. She was an odd woman. She would only have the one sherry at Christmas and announce ‘This is for the
Duke of Argyll!’ before drinking it. It was only when she started swearing that we realised she’d had one. She was out of it. She never knew. She blamed it on the sherry. When my mum found out she was furious.

  S. C.

  When mince pies have been consumed and Christmas cake demolished, there are still likely to be logs and roulades, stollens and Battenbergs, sponges and trifles.42 When those have gone there’ll be gingerbread, Family Circle biscuit selection boxes and the inevitable mountain of chocolate; the traditional tangerine goes out of the window and is replaced by the solid ball of Terry’s Chocolate Orange; the scaled-down chocolate bars in boxes of Celebrations allow us to briefly pretend that we’re giants browsing in a newsagent; there’s the socially ambitious Ferrero Rocher, and the reassuringly familiar Quality Street, which my friend Laura refers to at Christmas as Quantity Street. While the Black Magics and All Golds of this world still require a visual guide to each chocolate printed on the inside of the lid, the identity of each Quality Street confection is ingrained in British culture. We know what we’re getting, and we know which ones disappear first; surveys show that the purple one (officially known as ‘The Purple One’) is the most popular, and that’s fine with me because I controversially opt for the Toffee Penny.

  Gateshead, Christmas 1980

  In the 1970s and early 1980s, eating chocolate felt like something of a competitive sport. You’d get those big chocolate tools, really bad quality chocolate that had been fashioned into hammers. The selection boxes were a particularly big deal – I mean, when else would you receive eight or nine bars of chocolate to eat in one go? Whether it was Mars or Caramac, I’d happily scoff these things away in as short a time as possible.