Christmas
fare: A brief history
In order to understand Christmas fare, we need
to appreciate the seasonality of food in mid-winter. Hay was harvested in
summer and by November, when frost and snow began to fall, stock were moved
into barns and more often than not there was not enough hay for all the stock
so some would be slaughtered for meat. At the same time, landowners now had
time on their hands and so they turned to hunting, especially hunting birds:
Pheasant, partridge, grouse, guinea fowl, pigeons, duck & geese. The story
of the turkey follows later. Medieval winter has been described as an avian
slaughter. Preserving meat was a tiresome task and so the mince meat pie was
invented. It bears simply no resemblance to today’s mince pies.
To begin with, pies were baked in communal
ovens to reduce the risk of fires in cottages roofed in thatch. These pies used
a bread dough, with a thickness of at least an inch if not more, with the base
made like a mini coffin. That was the original use of the word before the
undertakers hijacked it and it became an unmentionable object in polite
circles. The ‘coffin’ was then loaded with chopped meat from hunted fowl and some
beef and mixed with seasonal dried fruits and nuts and topped with a generous dollop of strong liquor, all in the
interests of preservation. The lid of
the coffin-like pie was overlaid on top of the contents and the sides and top
sealed by pressing the dough together.
Quite frequently, en route to Church on
Christmas morning, families would stop at the bakers and place their pie in the
oven which was half way between a modern barbecue and a pizza oven. Lots would
have been drawn to determine who got which position in the communal oven. Four
or five hours later, the pie was reclaimed by the household and laid on the
table. The bread dough formed a very hard crust and usually, the bottom part
was burned. In households with servants, the latter would get this burned crust
while the gentry got the ‘upper crust’! Some of these pies were enormous and
there was a general tendency in all areas of Christmas fare for the landed
gentry to outdo one another in outlandish dishes. This is the recipe for a
famous Yorkshire mince pie:
“First
make a good standing crust and let the wall and bottom be very thick”. The
recipe then goes on to propose that a turkey, a goose, a guinea fowl, a
partridge and a pigeon be boned and place in the pie with the turkey breasts on
top. On one side a chopped hare could be piled and on the other side some
minced beef. Dried fruit, sugar, nuts, spices and port were added along with
four pounds of butter. ‘Then lay on the lid which must be very thick and bake
in a very hot oven for four hours’. The crust alone would require a bushel of
flour, that is all of over four stone of flour and the pie would often weigh up
to ten stone!
The transition from the meat-dominated crusty
mince pie to today’s mince pie required the mastery and popularisation of
pastry which differs from crusty dough with the addition of fat. The pastry pie
is tasty but not a strong as crusty pies. So adaptations were made and the
advent of fruit in mince pies began with Queen Elizabeth The First’s love of pies made with orangeado,
a candied orange peel. In time other fruits were candied as sugar became more
available and together with port and dried fruit, the recipes for modern meatless
mince pies came into vogue. Of course, the crude thick crusts of former pies were replaced with
various types of pastries from shortbread to puff pastry and the delicate
nature of pastry miniaturised the size of the now sweet pie, still retaining the title mince pie.
Now the mince pies of Christmas were the
subject of a very serious political edict in England. Cromwell and the Puritans
banned Christmas in 1645, believing it to be a sin-laden papish Catholic
festivity. One strict protestant , Philip Stubbes writing in his famed book ‘The
Anatomie of Abuses’ noted that “More mischief is that time committed than
in all the year besides ... What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking,
what banqueting and feasting is then used ... to the great dishonour of God and
the impoverishing of the realm”. The minced pie was banned as was all
Christmas fare. It was only restored when King Charles the second took over from Cromwell that the ban was lifted.
As I pointed out, winter time was the season
for the hunting of wild fowl and, again, because preservation was not possible,
a disproportionate consumption ensued. For landowners, hunting brought pheasant,
woodcock, pigeon, guinea fowl and the like but not of course turkey. The
meaning of turkey then and now is very different. Colonial explorers of the day
discovered in In Madagascar, a bird that was like a guinea fowl, only much
larger. Its meat was delicious with ample white breast meat and tasty brown leg
meat. It was seen as a real luxury back in the day. It was imported into Europe
either through Turkey or India. Thus ,what the English called turkey was just a
big exotic bird imported from Madagascar via Turkey, originally called Turkey
bird and then just turkey. The French regarded the same bird as having its
origins in India which became ‘Oison d’Inde’, Goose from India, abbreviated to
Dinde, the modern French word for turkey. Either way fowl dominated Christmas
fare except for the very lower classes who ate beef.
In England, Goose was regarded as a significant
social step up above lowly beef. The goose also provided superb feathers for
pillows, the finest quills for writing and, most importantly, the tail and
wing-tip feathers for arrows to guide flight. The inn keepers of England
ran Goose clubs for its patrons
beginning with the purchasing of young geese to be communally raised on local
commonage via a weekly subscription to
the club. But for the landed gentry, it
was this exotic imported bird from Turkey together with a range of hunted domestic
fowl that they focused on for Christmas and, for them, the social ladder
required as much culinary ostentation as possible. One way to impress was to go
as for as possible in the process of engrastation, nowadays called ‘stuffing’. It would not be uncommon to have the flesh of
a partridge stuffed into the cavity of a pigeon and for the whole pigeon to be
stuffed into the cavity of a goose and then to top it all to stuff the
multi-stuffed goose into the turkey.
The obsession with fowl at Christmas served as
a secretive way to pass on Catholic catechism across generations at a time when
all things Catholic were proscribed. The carol, The Twelve days of Christmas
celebrates the period of the birth of Christ, December 25th to the
arrival of the Magi from the East on January the 6th. Note that on
the 7th day, representing the Sabbath, the song describes what “My
true love gave to me” and ‘My True Love’ represents Christ. Thereafter the
parade of wild fowl provides guidance to young children about issues of
Catechism. Thus here is what was meant by the gifts of the 7th day
of Christmas:
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The partridge in a pear tree
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Christ,
since the mother partridge will feign injury to lure predators away from
defenceless nestlings.
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Two Turtle
Doves
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The old and New Testaments
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Three French
Hens
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The 3 gifts of the Magi
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Four Calling
Birds
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The 4 gospel evangelists: Mathew, Mark, Luke and
John
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Five Gold
rings
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Rings have no beginning or end and are thus
representative of eternity. Five depicts the first 5 books of the Jewish Torah:
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers
and Deuteronomy.
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Six Geese a-laying.
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The 6
days of Creation
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Seven Swans a-swimming
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The 6 days
of creation and the 7th day of rest.
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Eight Maids a milking
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The 8 beatitudes
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Nine ladies dancing
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The 9
Angelic choirs
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Ten Lords a-leaping
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The 10
commandments
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The eleven pipers playing
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The 12
apostles minus Judas
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The twelve
drummers drumming
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The 12 precepts of the apostle’s creed
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Will it ever sound the same to you again?
Let me return to the turkey. When the colonial
settlers reached the North-Western US territories they encountered a new bird
that lived in covered forests but with field breaks to allow this bird with
limited flight, to escape temporarily from the forest in search of prey. This ‘undocumented
bird’ if I may call it so, looked just
like the bird that was imported at Christmas from Africa via Turkey back in the
homeland and by then simply called, turkey, and so this new “undocumented” bird was also called
a turkey. It was first introduced into Europe in Spain, spreading northwards
and assumed the title of Turkey in England and Dinde in France. Turkeys were
domestically farmed and would be herded great distances from farming areas to
towns and cities creating the early days of the turkey Christmas market. In
time, the bird lost its already limited ability to fly and was ideal for
fattening for Christmas in Europe and in Thanksgiving in the US. We haven’t
looked back.
But we are not quite finished with engastration
or stuffing. In the Cajun region of the US, Paul Prudhomme, the famous
Louisiana chef, whilst working at a carvery, decided that the turkey was
boring. He set out in the mid 80’s to improve it and invented and patented the
now famous Cajun treat, the Turducken. This is a Duck stuffed with a Hen and in
turn the stuffed duck is stuffed into the Turkey ~ Turkey-Duck-Hen, “Turducken”.
I have a good friend, a very famous nutritionist, who annually hosts a New
Year’s Eve party in her home in Washington where the piece-de-resistance is her
Cajun Turducken. The Turducken wasn’t the first phenomenon of stuffing smaller
de-boned birds into bigger de-boned birds. In 1807 The French food critic, Grimod
de La Reynière (one of the first of this species! ) described “roast without
equal"—a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a
duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a
quail, a thrush, a lark, an ortolan bunting and a garden warbler: 17 birds in
all!
When all the savoury meats and stuffings, the
potatoes and vegetables are gone, its time to switch course and focus on the
sweet side of Christmas dinner. Pride of place is the Plum Pudding but to
understand the plum pudding we need to go back in time. Offal, fat, spices and fruits (the best preservatives
of their day) were mixed with meats, grains and vegetables and packed into cow’s
stomachs as meat puddings (as opposed to meat pies) so they would keep as long
as possible. This also had the advantage that it could be cooked at home by
boiling over the home fire and emerged in rural areas where bakers communal
ovens weren’t available. In the 1700s, dried fruit became more plentiful as in
currants (dried grapes from the Corinth region of Greece), sultanas (from the Sultans
of the Izmir region of Turkey), raisins (called after racemus meaning a bunch
of grapes) and of course dried local plums. As sugar became more plentiful from
the Caribbean, candied fruit peelings were also added to the mix. In time, the
meat component of the old savour puddings fell away, just as with mince pies. The use of animal stomachs was
abandoned in favour of muslin cloths. However, the now sweet tasting pudding
retained the tradition of exposure to the gut by incorporating suet, the fat
which surrounds the kidney, into the recipe. In fact tradition holds that there should be thirteen
ingredients in a Christmas plum pudding representing Christ and the twelve apostles.
Finally we turn to crackers which are part of
the fun of Christmas dinner. Believe it or not, Christmas crackers have their
origins in food, specifically boiled sweets. What was special about these
Christmas sweet treats is that were wrapped in pretty paper wrapping which, back in the day, was itself quite a novelty. The progression
from wrapped sweets to Cracker Bonbons, brings us back to cap guns that became
popular in the US after the Civil War. A tiny amount of explosive material was
placed in a container of a toy gun and
when the trigger was pulled the firing pin was released to make a bang. I grew
up with cap guns and can still recall the smell of the explosive and the tiny
wisp of smoke that accompanied the bang. I was The Cisco Kid! Well, in the 1860’s, Tom Smith an entrepreneurial confectioner,
decided to remove the sweet from the cracker bonbon, enlarge it, insert two
strips of material each connected to one end of the cracker and meeting in the middle in a simple
mechanism the glides an explosive material across and an abrasive material. Little
poems and trinkets and party hats. Were
inserted into the cracker. When each end
is pulled, the tiny explosive on one strip is rubbed against an abrasive part
of the other strip and the cracker bangs just as it opens, always unevenly. The
larger part has the goodies. Much more fun than boiled sweets.
Happy Christmas and Bon Appetit!
There’s
much more to Christmas traditions beside food: from Christmas trees, to
stockings, to boxing day, to carols and of course St Nick himself. Mark
Forsyth’s “A Christmas Cornucopia- the hidden stories behind our Yuletide
traditions” tells it all. I have also consulted many volumes from the Edible
Series of Reaktion Books and of course Wikipedia, to which I make a financial
contribution.
Michael J
Gibney, Dublin, December 2018. ©
