Spectator Life

The 1990s comedy series the Royle Family includes a perfect scene in which Barbara says she won’t bother getting a turkey the following year, as nobody actually likes it. Everyone looks horrified. But she’s right. Advocaat, mince pies, Christmas pudding, Christmas cake (especially the marzipan) cranberry sauce, and balls of sausage meat made into stuffing – there is a very good reason why we tend only to eat and drink certain things at Christmas. Never buy a cheese selection, because among the mediocre bits and pieces, there is bound to be some abomination That said, I am aware that certain ingredients are staples in some households. Boiled carrots and sprouts, for example, which – for some unknown reason – appear on Sunday lunch menus week in, week out.

It is now not unusual to find ‘bone broth’ in the refrigerated sections of supermarkets or delis, on sale for more than £7. Who can afford this stuff? If you have the time to make your own stock then all credit to you. But if not, the concentrated stock in little cubes or tubs is perfectly acceptable. Knorr and fancy upstarts such as Kallo pose as the superior products. But Oxo has stood the test of time. In a flooded stock market, their cubes remain my choice. Beef is the classic (the name ‘Oxo’ is thought to come from the word ‘ox’). Retailers seem to have taken the lamb version off the shelves, though the brand says they’re working on getting it back. The company has moved with the times, a few years ago launching the first vegan cube.

‘It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ’em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.’ (A Christmas Carol.) And there is exactly the problem with festive fowl. In most cases, we get turkey. And usually we get it far too big, which leads to all the problems of using the thing up over the course of a week. It may have been fine for Bob Cratchit’s large family but for most people, the mammoth turkey isn’t the way to go. A turkey is a fine bird (one of the trinity of actually useful things, with potatoes and tomatoes, to come out of the European discovery of America) – but it’s not the only option.

December is when about 90 per cent of Baileys consumption takes place, and yet nobody really knows why. I used to work at an ad agency called Young & Rubicam, and we had the Baileys account. We’d spend all year writing ads to persuade people to drink it at some point – any point – between January and November, but to no avail. Baileys was never intended as a Christmas tipple Baileys introduced more summery variants: strawberries and cream flavour, apple strudel, even ‘Baileys colada’. For these, we wrote ads featuring happy drinkers in straw boaters, German lederhosen and loud Hawaiian shirts, but the British public gave a big thumbs-down to all of it. Come 1 December, however, they’d again start caning Baileys, overwhelmingly favouring its original flavour.

My first Negroni was in a bar called Turandot, in a piazza in Lucca, Tuscany. It was the summer of 1996, and I noticed the waiter bringing out an intriguing-looking red liquid, served in a rocks glass over a large ice cube, and garnished with an orange slice. I had agreed to split a bottle of prosecco with my three holiday companions, despite hating the stuff. But it was a warm, lazy evening, the fizz was nice and cold, and a drink is a drink, after all. I asked the waiter to bring me whatever it was he was serving the other customers, and soon I was taking my first sip of what has since been my favourite pre-dinner cocktail. I can’t understand why there are so many bastardised variations. Why mess with perfection?

Stir-up Sunday may be behind us, but it’s not too late to make your Christmas pudding – and do you know what that means? Yep, sourcing decent beef suet. Suet is the king of fats. It adds to the pudding’s keeping quality, texture and flavour. My recipe calls for half a pound of suet (see below for the recipe in full – it was my great-aunt’s) but the good stuff is hard to find. You can get pellets of suet in a packet from supermarkets, but the real thing, grated into light flakes, is another story: much nicer and lighter. Some inferior recipes suggest butter instead, but good as butter is, it just doesn’t cut it for a Christmas pudding. Suet is the hard creamy fat around the beef kidney.

You might think that, as a country, we have had our fair share of food security wobbles over the last few years: first with pre-Brexit panic, and the hoarding that went along with it, and then the empty supermarket shelves that few of us will forget during the height of the pandemic. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house: British farmers are threatening to stop supplying supermarkets in protest against the government’s plans to apply inheritance tax to family farms. What we might be able to cook in a few weeks is as expansive as ‘almost anything’ or as limited as ‘almost nothing’ What does that mean for the average person doing the weekly shop? Are we returning to the days of rationed eggs and powdered milk? Not quite.

My brother went to Japan recently, and I asked him to buy me a knife. As anyone who has entered the bowels of a restaurant knows, Japanese blades are highly sought after. I had to decide between an 18cm utility knife or a metre-long Maguro bōchō. The carbon steel of the latter can fillet a 500-pound tuna in a single cut. In Japan, it is wielded by two highly skilled fish butchers, and it usually comes with a wooden scabbard as protection for the blade – and anyone standing near it. The Maguro bōchō was created purely in a culinary capacity, not as a weapon of war Boringly, I opted for the utility knife. I reasoned that I could always buy a razor-sharp, 24-inch blade online at a later date. However, my hopes have been dashed.

You could say the British were to blame. The dramatic rise and subsequent fall of Beaujolais has its roots in the early 1970s, when Sunday Times wine correspondent Allan Hall laid down a challenge for his readers. The first to go to Beaujolais, in eastern France, and bring him back a bottle of that year’s just-pressed wine (known as Beaujolais nouveau) would win a bottle of champagne.  Readers rose to the challenge, enlisting cars, trucks, private jets and even parachutes and an elephant as they rushed to be first. The Beaujolais Run became an annual institution, and local vignerons frantically planted new vines to meet demand.

Ikea has opened its first high-street restaurant in the UK. There's not a flat-pack in sight – but a hotdog is 85p and a children’s pasta dish with tomato sauce (plus soft drink and piece of fruit) is 95p. A nine-piece full English will set you back £3.75, while a serving of their famous meatballs (with mash, peas, cream sauce and lingonberry jam) is £5.50. Vegetarians are amply catered for. It’s open 12 hours a day (and that may be extended further to enable dinner). There’s free wifi and somewhere to charge your phone. Even better, there is no music. It’s not pretending to be anything it isn’t.