Christmas dinner, when you’re the one cooking it, is an oddly spiritual gesture. It’s not just roast meat and spuds on a plate, like any other Sunday. It may look just like it, give or take a blob of cranberry, but Christmas dinner is imbued with memories. Oh, and hopes, dreams, love and loss, too. All the good, emotionally churning stuff that pairs well with a glass of brandy.
When I’m shelling sprouts on Christmas Eve, to Keeping The Dream Alive by Freiheit on Radio 2, putting each stubby bullet in a pan of cold water, my mind will wander over at least 10 previous dinners. My fierce Cumberland grandmother, long gone and so very missed, blasting sprouts to mulch in an old-school pressure cooker. The year I and my ex-husband learned that pancetta, cream, pepper and a casserole pot transformed sprouts from also-ran side dish into crowd-pleasing sensation. We actually ran out of sprouts before roast potatoes that year.
At our house, a packet of Colman’s bread sauce must always be bought, despite it having no real fans. It will be plonked on the table last of all, stirred in a Pyrex jug as a panicked afterthought, in wonky memory of long-departed great aunts and uncles. “I don’t even like bread sauce,” we’ll mutter as each one of us dutifully takes a few spoons of the largely unlovable, beige paste. “Oh, remember Aunty Beat? She loved it. Wouldn’t eat turkey without it. Used to drive us mad.”
It’s perfectly easy to make a British Christmas dinner for the very first time, even if you’re not a remotely skilled cook. Just shove a dead bird in the oven and serve it with winter veg such as parsnips, though try not to mention, if you’re French, say (as my other half is), that panais is fit only for horse feed. Or if you feel, as he does, that even making gravy is admitting in advance that all your vegetables are going to be dry.
I’m not sure, though, that the big meal tastes remotely the same without a whole lot of family history. A colleague told me recently that her Sri Lankan family spent their first Christmas Eve in the UK bickering in a soon-to-close Sainsbury’s about what even constituted a British Christmas dinner. They were panic-buying gravy granules and enjoying some earthy, passive-aggressive, sibling-based sniping over who’d be lumbered with cooking the bloody thing anyway. My heart leapt: it was their first British Christmas, and I couldn’t help but think they’d absolutely nailed it.
Not least because, unbeknownst to them, they were making magical yuletide memories. “Remember the fight we had over brandy butter in Sainsbury’s in 2018? When I stormed off to Costa and you sulked in the car?” They could now gleefully remind each other of it over each and every spoon of brandy butter for ever more. Hosanna in excelsis!
When I’m stuffing my hand up a bird, retrieving giblets, or arranging the pigs in blankets, I enjoy every little Dent family memory, but that doesn’t stop me dreaming of a more perfect, refined, stress-free dinner. In the future, in 2040, say, I aspire to have an elegant Christmas on my almost-too-enormous country estate. Think Penelope Keith in To The Manor Born, when she finally marries Richard and gets her house back, combined with a touch of 1982 Princess Margaret at Sandringham.
Dinner will arrive under a variety of cloches, the table setting will be tasteful, there will be enough chairs so no one has to sit on a foldable seat with a beer holder that was last used at Glastonbury. There will also be no turkey. We’ll eat nut roast stuffed with macadamia, pecan and pistachio, so I don’t have another poor turkey on my conscience.
In my dream, my family will accept this graciously, without quibble. No one will burp or bicker or bring up the 2040 version of Brexit. I will not peel or chop anything myself, yet I’ll appear occasionally before guests in an apron, looking fragrant and unruffled. My husband, who will be an elderly, yet still smoking-hot Morten Harket from A-Ha, will entertain us over pudding with a moving acoustic version of Hunting High and Low.
Post-dinner, we’ll play erudite parlour games while drinking fine armagnac. It will not be like other Christmases, where the Dents lie about from 5pm, incapacitated by sherry trifle and slagging off the new Quality Street (so small! So not as good as we remember!!), while still gobbling down an entire plastic box, toffee fingers and all, and watching the high-jinks of the Emmerdale Christmas special.
Or maybe I won’t change a thing in the future. I love our perfectly imperfect Dent Christmas. We’ve honed how this day works for decades, so why spoil a winning formula?
