Elizabeth David was a cookery writer who led the British palate away from the grim days of stodgy, post-war rationing towards the adoption of a fresher, more Mediterranean diet. But she saved the most resonant advice of her six decade writing career for an observation on how to survive a typical British Christmas. Describing the festive period here as The Great Too Much that has also become The Great Too Long, David wrote:
A ten-day shut-down, no less, is now normal at Christmas. On at least one day during The Great Too Long stretch, I stay in bed, making myself lunch on a tray. Smoked salmon, home-made bread, butter, lovely cold white Alsace Wine. A glorious way to celebrate Christmas.
‘An Italian friend of mine once told me that in Sardinia a peasant woman had said to her, “Christmas without a roast cat wouldn’t be Christmas.” Each to his own tradition’
It’s hard to think of a more elegant recipe for a slatternly day in bed. The suggestion is the footnote to the introduction to Elizabeth David’s Christmas, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Published posthumously in 1992, it marks David’s final work proper, in the sense that it’s substantially made up of previously unpublished original material compiled from notes towards a book she had been working on for many years. And it’s a quite delightful book.
There are reminiscences of early family Christmases in a vast country house, with servants manning the kitchens rather than a mother. Then she describes her first Christmas dinner alone, in wartime Cairo, where she worked for the Admiralty and where her Egyptian domestic help keeps setting fire to the NAAFI-issue pudding between each course, such is his excitement at this novel idea.
As to the food itself, there are things that have fallen from fashion but sound like they are crying out to be revived: a delicate tomato consommé, cream of mushroom soups, prawn paste, spiced beef, brined geese and ducks, a refreshing tangerine ice. Then there’s the wildly impractical, never-to-be-revived or simply gross: vast pressed whole ox tongues, a giblet casserole, a dessert of spiced stewed prunes, a green salad with sprouts, advice on how to decapitate a suckling pig in order to accommodate it in a domestic oven, followed by the suggestion that the meat from the head might appeal to children.
On this note, my second favourite line is this, which comes amid a passionate denunciation of bread sauce: ‘An Italian friend of mine once told me that in Sardinia a peasant woman had said to her, “Christmas without a roast cat wouldn’t be Christmas.” Each to his own tradition.’ Or perhaps that should be: chacun à son chat. Of course modern tastes suggest that, rather than cooking him, we are more likely to invite the cat to join us in the bed – while being mindful to keep him apart from the smoked salmon sandwich.
This book is more an esoteric exploration of winter festival food than a practical guide; and David is as much a food historian here as a dispenser of detailed recipes. For example, she devotes many more pages to a dessert that she concedes no one any longer eats – frumenty – than she does to, say, roasting turkey. This pudding, essentially sweetened stewed whole wheat grains, dates back to pre-Christian Britain, thus predating Christmas itself.
Yet there is only a single, short recipe for whole roast turkey and in this David abruptly drops the bombshell that she cooks hers on its side – firstly on one side, then the other – without thinking to even explain why. And of course her methods frequently seem old fashioned: that turkey is stuffed with raw pork, cooked for three hours – and there’s barely a mention of resting. Whereas these days food fashion dictates that you don’t put stuffing anywhere near the bird, that it spends half that time cooking – and then rests for hours.
Her expectations can be quaint too: some of the meat recipes assume one has a professional relationship with a ‘poulterer’. But the cumulative effect is a sensuous and evocative read. David, a longtime Spectator contributor, suffered a birthday during The Great Too Long Stretch, on Boxing Day. The idea of taking to one’s bed recurs a second time in the book, from a 1959 piece in Vogue: ‘If I had my way – and I shan’t – my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of an omelette and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening.’
But by the time she was writing her Christmas book in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of a day in bed with wine had apparently evolved from an unrealistic aspiration to an actual annual ritual. And good for her.
It is without doubt my favourite such observation in all Christmas cookery writing, narrowly edging out Delia Smith’s advice during her chronological run-through of how to do the big Christmas meal, and suggesting, between prepping the chipolatas and the sprouts: ‘Then you are free for a few minutes to go and have a pre-lunch glass of champagne. You deserve it.’ Fine advice, which I followed this and every other year, but not as magnificent as ‘take the whole bottle and go to bed – all day.’
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