We’re in the thick of it now, the most wonderful time of the year. No sleigh bells for you, though, if you’re the designated cook, just the clanging chimes of doom tolling down the days until you confront your greatest adversary. Lunch or dinner, call it what you will, but just a few sleeps now until the protein megabomb descends to test your mettle. Judgement day is coming, and us cooks are just whistling past the butcher’s counter, groaning with dead fowl and dismembered pigs.
Anyone who says otherwise is telling Christmas pork pies. Seasoned chefs, Instagram personae, Irish mammies, the three wise men, it matters not. Be sceptical of false prophets, especially on television, who would have you believe it’s as easy as rolling off a yule log. There is no 15-minute Christmas. We all know who they are, these illusionists who conjure a magical world with all the trimmings in balmy July, an army of food elves just out of shot and up to their green breeches in kitchen detritus.
What a serene Christmas tableau they portray, but it’s snake oil burning in those scented candles. Gamely, each will look to put a novel twist on matters: a Thai lemongrass scented stuffing here, a Korean gochujang-infused ham glaze there. (I made that up, but the ham glaze has promise.) In fairness, it’s hard to reinvent a ritual whose raison d’être is to remain unchanged since 1843, when Bob Cratchit tried to secure the prize turkey in A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens has a lot to answer for, as does Isabella Beeton, who literally wrote the book with Mrs Beeton’s Christmas in 1861.
Sombre current affairs output has switched to autopilot for tinselled items such as the trial by media of Brussels sprouts, feigning pantomime outrage at this poor little brassica that never harmed anybody. Some of us remember that these Christmas segments were exactly the same a year before, and the years before that back to radio antiquity. Cheffy types are by now as ubiquitous as Luke O’Neill during Covid, storming the airwaves with round-the-clock transmissions on what to do with the giblets. During the break, supermarkets pummel you with ads for the turkey whose eviscerated gizzards now lie before you, along withindustrial quantities of miniaturised party foods you never knew you needed. From every Sunday newspaper cascades a forest of food advertising supplements, in a carnal spectacle that must make this time of year hard going for vegetarians. You can avert your eyes, but it wont help in this saturated environment. Images of Christmas food glisten everywhere.
Meanwhile, the uneasy peace that governs our retail environment is suspended, and martial law has been declared. Where once was familiar terrain now stand pallets of selection boxes. Imposing mountain ranges of tinned sweets have also appeared, forced from the bowels of the earth beneath the supermarket by tectonic action beyond our feeble ken.
[ Christmas dinner with a twist: a classic beef Wellington and honey-glazed duck ]
As we enter the final frenzy of Christmas week, the fresh produce disorientation is overwhelming. Non-essential supply chains grind to a halt. Fennel and other dissenting vegetables will be disappeared to the gulags and you may as well grow your own coriander. Conversely, splurge on fresh cranberries as it will be 12 months before you see them again, which is a pity because they are delicious. You can have any fish you want, as long as it’s smoked salmon. Such are the centrifugal forces of the Christmas spread that it will be mid January before sanity returns to the aisles.
Eating out won’t help either. As I recall from a formative decade spent cooking in restaurants, December can be a joyless time for the trade. With a lean first quarter on the immediate horizon, there’s nothing for it but get ‘em in, stack ‘em high, gouge the markup and shovel out that belt and braces offering like your solvency depended on it. There is an air of gavage to proceedings, the discredited practice for fattening geese whose livers are destined for foie gras. The bookings are large, unruly and somewhat inebriated; the pressure to turn tables around is relentless, and the double shifts make a mockery of the EU Working Time Directive. On it rolls, prep into service, lunch into dinner, rinse and repeat until the nine daily espressos eventually take their toll and the whole hospitality sector collapses in a broken heap on the Christmas Day sofa.
Much to the chagrin of the kitchen, conventional wisdom demands that seasonal clichés make an appearance on the truncated festive menu. This greatly diminishes the supposed deferred gratification of the lunch you have waited a full 364 days to consume. I will concede that micro-dosing the odd mince pie during advent is allowable, but we need to talk about the sandwich. As a general rule, shoehorning a whole dinner between two slices of bread is not sensible, Christmas cold cuts and their accoutrements being the exception. Call me a Christmas fundamentalist but this brute should only appear after the business in the Bethlehem manger has concluded. But it seems this prince among sandwiches has been captured by neoliberal ideologues determined to put one on every street corner throughout the month of December. Is nothing sacred?
Food systems are a source of fascination – how it gets on our plate, who gets paid along the supply chain, who profits from our desires, who picks up the environmental tab – and Christmas might be the scariest, knottiest system of them all. The logistics of getting nearly everyone, everywhere, all at once eating identical dinners at 4pm are dizzyingly complex. I say “nearly” in deference to my fellow Irish citizens who do not observe the Christian holiday, looking on in bemusement as we get our knickers in a national twist over the perfect roast potato.
Will this evident curmudgeon be knocking out the roasties, parsnips, stuffing, the gochujang-glazed ham and all the other faff come December 25th? Despite the crass commercialisation, the waste and hyperbole, the arse getting torn out of it at every turn, Christmas dinner somehow comes through with its dignity intact and of course I will, being blessed to have a home in which to cook it for people I love.
I will empty the fridge beforehand as if bailing out a sinking lifeboat. I will run through the stove juggling choreography in my head and attend diligently to my mis en place. There will be Champagne at breakfast, but abstinence thereafter until I have manhandled the roasting trays with their molten fats out of the oven, because A&E on Christmas Day is a real buzzkill. There will be no starter. I will make bread sauce, which no one but me will eat. The ham will be enormous, the turkey will be the smallest I can procure, because tu**ey curry is a hard “no”, and even saying it gives me the ick. At some point I will throw a strop for theatrical effect and concede defeat to my arch nemesis, the croquette potato. Fired in a wok at the last moment, the sprouts will be aggressively al dente, and then I will carve, and the kitchen will be filled with aromas and laughter and anticipation and finally, despite itself, Christmas will be real.
Gerry Godley bakes, thinks and writes on Instagram @bread_man_walking
