Prue Leith

My Christmas nightmares

Even professional cooks can muck everything up

Christmas in our family seems to guarantee tears and tantrums as well as jingle bells and jollity. Indeed, in my childhood, ‘feeling Christmassy’ meant feeling thoroughly overwrought or bad tempered, the antithesis of the ‘Christmas Spirit’. I think my father invented it when my mother, who was a terrible cook, spent all day making marmalade to give as Christmas presents and was then beside herself with anger when she burnt the lot.

My earliest Christmas disaster was my first attempt at cake icing. I’d proudly come home from school with a Christmas cake. It was covered with smooth royal icing on which I’d painted the Three Kings — but I’d omitted the teaspoon of glycerine in the icing which would have stopped it drying to concrete. My Dad broke my mother’s ivory-handled knife on it. He was using it as a chisel and hitting it with a hammer. The handle split but the icing did not. We turned the whole thing over and scooped out the cake and marzipan.

When I left home and had my own flat, I set fire to the Christmas tree. I had had the bright, but it turned out dangerous, idea of spraying the branches with hairspray to stop the needles falling. In those days we had real little candles on metal holders that clipped precariously to the branches. One tipped over and the hairspray and home-made paper decorations ensured the tree’s rapid incineration, followed by buckets of water, a sodden carpet and me feeling distinctly ‘Christmassy’.

Everyone has nightmares of the turkey ending up on the floor. Well, I’ve been there, but no one saw. I just picked it up and carried on. I mean, what would you do, with a dozen people waiting to be fed? I have even yanked a ham out of the jaws of a visiting Great Dane, given it a good wash under the cold tap and said not a word.

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