Spectator Life

Christmas baking should be a source of joy. It should be something we look forward to, a break from the hectic organisation of dozens of presents, reams of wrapping paper, cosy-but-thoughtful decoration, enormous meals, endless Christmas parties, and stressful hosting. But Christmas baking can take on a life of its own: fruit cakes that ‘should’ have been made months ago (that three members of your family will tell you loudly they do not like and will not eat), puddings that need hours on the hob, edible biscuity decorations with boiled sweet centres that will inevitably stale on the tree. It can just become another chore. Now, I love a Christmas pudding. I even love making one, when I have the time, energy and inclination.

Christmas puddings are a little like Marmite: you either love them beyond all measure, or you’d be perfectly happy if one never crossed your path again. But, unlike Marmite, there are dozens on the market to pick through – and given that most of us will only eat one a year, it’s important to get the right pudding for you. We’ve taste-tested more Christmas puds than one person should ever eat to bring you the best of the best. Best overall pudding runner up: Aldi Specially Selected Marc de Champagne Christmas Pudding, 400g, £4.99 What they say: A celebration of vine fruits, glacé cherries and nuts blended with cider brandy, Champagne and a splash of Marc de Champagne brandy. Sprinkle with silver glitter to finish.

Like Father Christmas, I’m making a list, and checking it twice. I have scoured the food and drink world to bring you the greatest and most varied gifts for Christmas 2021. Entirely coincidentally, those who are obliged to buy presents for me can consider this my Christmas list, but I hope it will also provide inspiration for the food-lover in your life. For the keen cook I’ve used a lot of cooking thermometers over the years, both at home and at work, and Thermapen is the hands-down winner. With a temperature range of -49.9 to 299.9°C, and an accurate measurement in one second, it is easy to use, easy to read, and easy to clean.

If you’re looking for an alternative to Christmas cake (or an addition to it), then panforte is the bake for you. Sufficiently similar to our traditional Christmas cake in its flavours of Medieval spice, dried fruit and candied citrus that it can’t fail to evoke the Christmas spirit, it is still entirely distinctive. Panforte is shallower than Christmas cake, and more solid; the honey in the mix means that it is chewy rather than crumbly, and where a Christmas cake is stuffed full of vine fruits and cherries, panforte majors in dates and figs. A slim wedge of the dense, spiced bake is more than sufficient and even, whisper it, more elegant than our homegrown Christmas cake.

People are always disproportionately impressed by hasselback potatoes. Disproportionately because they are one of the easiest potato-based sides to make: just a few knife cuts, and tossed in some olive oil. They don’t require the par-boiling or roughing up of roast potatoes, and are less fragile than the simply boiled variety. As well as being handsome, they are buttery-soft inside, with crisp, taught skins, and crunchy bits where the knife has cut – and they have the added bonus of cutting faster than potatoes which remain in tact. The cuts increase the surface area, meaning greater crispness, which can only ever be a good thing when it comes to potatoes – and as they roast, the cuts force the potato to splay, to bloom.

Chardonnay has fallen dramatically out of favour. It’s passé, old hat and, well, just that little bit naff. I’m referring, of course, to the girls name, twenty years ago, which was briefly in vogue in certain circles. Indeed, in 2003 – thanks to the popularity of Chardonnay Lane-Pascoe, a character in the ITV seriesFootballers’ Wives – some sixty five baby girls were officially registered with the moniker Chardonnay. Today, only a handful of babies are thus encumbered.

It’s well documented how excited, or horrified, food enthusiasts are by the Salt Baes of this world ­– gold coated Japanese steaks certainly look good on social media. But a nice potato? Some bright, green leaves? The frilliest mushrooms or a plump bulb of fennel? We don’t often hear praise for the more humbler kitchen ingredients, especially the ones grown on British shores. Things are changing, but for many raw produce still doesn’t quite cut the mustard. You only need to look at the amount of salmon consumed in the UK to realise we don’t always care about where our food comes from. Perhaps it’s that we take for granted the availability of everything all the time.

There are all sorts of things we’re prepared to do once December rears its head, that we’d absolutely turn our noses up at in a less festive month: back to back parties, kitsch decorations, adding spices to anything that stands still long enough, engaging with relatives we normally avoid. And there are certain foods and drinks which would seem bizarre at any other time of the year, but we heartily embrace once there’s some tinsel swinging around, and chief among them is eggnog. Perhaps it is its rich, indulgent nature that means we only countenance it around Christmas, its spiced nature, or simply its surprisingly high alcohol content. Essentially a boozy, drinkable custard, eggnog is made from cream and milk, egg yolks, sugar whisked egg whites, and alcohol.

If you’re a lover of Pinot Noir and fine red burgundy you’re doubtless in a bit of a stew. You’re worried that although the about-to-be-launched 2020 vintage is an absolute cracker, the amount of Pinot produced was down by around 40 per cent and there ain’t going to be enough to go round. You’re also fretting that since the recently-harvested 2021 vintage was cursed with frost, hail, rain, disease and just about everything else, only miniscule amounts of Pinot were produced. The quality – amazingly – is high, but you’ll be darn lucky to get your hands on any.

What gift is good enough for the Queen? A crop of French Perigord black truffles (worth £150-£200 per 100g) is no bad choice – as Prince Philip discovered after 12 years of fruitless attempts to coax the mushroom into growing on the Queen's Sandringham estate. Aside from making the Duke of Edinburgh reportedly the first person to cultivate black truffles from English soil, the success also fulfilled a decades-long obsession he had developed with the elusive fungi. His love affair with these 'black diamonds' is said to have begun in the 60s after the Duke was taken on a truffle-hunting excursion in Italy by his uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma. 'We were never allowed to buy fresh truffles at the palace.

There's an air of familiarity about the former head chef of Claridge's penchant for plant-based food. It was reported this weekend that he has left his role after the hotel passed on his plans for an entirely plant-based menu. All credit to Claridge's who are one of the few institutions not to have swallowed this particular culinary cool aid. And yet these sorts of gastro-themed spats are becoming all too common. The all-or-nothing attitude of many plant-based devotees has made dining out an increasingly divisive experience. Remember when the 'vegetarian option' meant making do with a cheese omelette and ethical eating involved skipping the prawn cocktail starter and going straight for the steak and chips?

There are some dishes on which I am well aware I hold strong opinions: toast (well done but not burnt, real butter, generously spread; must be eaten hot), crumble (crunchy, not soggy, lots of it; simply must be served with custard, ideally cold), roast chicken (cooked hot and fast, with more butter than is sensible, until the skin crackles; the chicken oysters are always cook’s perks). But some catch me unawares. I don’t realise that I feel strongly about a particular recipe of foodstuff until I’m staring down the barrel of a recipe, or contemplating something that doesn’t meet my surprisingly exacting standards. I’ll find myself holding forth on the correct way to make an egg mayonnaise sandwich, or the one true way of cooking porridge.

At this time of year, nothing beats a cosy tavern with steamed up windows, a roaring fire and hearty food. ‘Gastropubs’ have come under some justified criticism over the years: trying too hard to be restaurants and with prices to match, pricing out their former loyal clientele. Too many regular pubs meanwhile are happy to serve microwaved food or, as is the fashion nowadays, mediocre Thai cuisine. Pub or gastropub, the most successful food offerings at a good watering hole are often the pies. With any luck there will be options: picnic pies with hot water crust pastry (Crystelle from Bake Off recently produced a good-looking curried chicken and potato terrine pie) and the likes of shepherd’s pie topped with buttery mash.

Marble cakes are a simple concept, but such a satisfying bake, with that delightful reveal when you cut into the cake and expose the hidden pattern. They are made by dividing the base cake batter, and adding colouring or flavouring to one part of it, and then mottled by dolloping light and dark batter alternately into the same cake tin. They were a feature of my childhood, but feel a little passé now, which is a shame, as they’re well worth your baking energies. I think it’s time to bring them back. Now, many marble cake recipes will simply use a basic pound cake recipe, and introduce a couple of tablespoons of cocoa powder to half of the batter.

There’s never been a better year to celebrate Bonfire Night. Late night, outdoor, responsible fun to enjoy now that there’s precious little else to do after 10 p.m. Plus it’s surely therapeutic to remind ourselves that while things are currently a little tough going and hosting a dinner party in your home is an act of high treason, the country had its fair share of problems in 1605 too. Round-the-fire cooking isn’t the same as barbeque cooking: utensils are at a minimum; heat control is down to a wing and a prayer. This is ‘chuck it near the heat and pray the kids won’t go hungry’ cooking. So here are six things to try on 5th November, when you can’t face another toasted marshmallow.

If you’re bracing for a bleak winter by lining up a box-set binge, then at least there’s a glut of options on the gogglebox right now. And as you settle on the sofa, the moment will be capped if you find the most appropriate drink to sip as you get square eyes. Here then, are some perfect pairs. Succession, with Old Fashioned Sky Atlantic/HBO’s Succession revels in a luxurious backdrop of deal-making private helicopter drops and tête-à-tête tension on over-sized yachts, along with impossibly expensive tailoring, timepieces and indeed discerning drinks.

I must have written thousands of words about my love of stews, braises, and slow-cooked dishes, but osso bucco must be one of my longtime, unchanging favourites. Osso bucco comes from the Northern Italian region of Lombardy, and is made from braised veal shanks. It’s a cut that not only benefits from, but really needs, a low slow cook, bathing in stock and booze, until the meat is tender enough to be broken apart with the edge of a fork. The dish name literally translates as ‘hole in the bone’, which quietly points to the magic of the dish (or, you could argue, misses it entirely).

Well done, Joanna Lumley. The 75-year-old actress has solved the climate crisis. She proposes a return to wartime rationing when shoppers had to surrender government coupons whenever they bought meat, sugar, petrol, bread and even soap. ‘You’re given a certain amount of points,’ she told the Radio Times, ‘and it’s up to you how to spend them, whether it’s on a bottle of whisky or flying in an aeroplane.’ The rarer the pleasure, the greater the relish. It sounds ideal. We can defeat the climate crisis by tightening our belts and agreeing to a common set of rules. And on Thursday evenings we’ll stand on our doorsteps flapping our ration-books and cheering like maniacs. However, it's likely that double standards will emerge.

There was a nifty about-turn last week when the so-called Nudge Unit, the government’s behavioural policy advisory body, abandoned its proposals to get us to shift towards a plant-based diet and away from eating meat. Among other exciting intiatives it suggested 'building support for a bold policy' such as a tax on producers of mutton and beef. It pointed out that the government could get people used to a vegetarian diet through its spending in hospitals, schools, prisons, courts and military facilities – you can just imagine how that would go down with soldiers, prisoners and patients – and declared that a 'timely moment to intervene' would be when people are at university. But it also acknowledged that an 'unsophisticated meat tax would be highly regressive'.