Chocolate-coated brazil nuts, mince pies, stollen bread, Christmas pudding, turkey, bread sauce, sage and onion stuffing. Some of the foods that we seem to consume at this time of year only. How much better they taste after a year of abstinence. I am sure that Melvyn Bragg enjoys his wine much more for abstaining for six months of the year. Perhaps we should go back to taking Lent much more seriously.
Even fairly disgusting food (bread sauce is my bete blanc noir) can be enjoyable if it is consumed rarely enough. My preference would be for twice in a lifetime.
There is something about tastes and smells that trigger memories so much more strongly than images or verbal descriptions. It's something to do with the sense of smell being better connected to our primitive lizard brain, I dimly recall. Whatever the biological explanation, it's really not Christmas unless you've had at least a couple of turkey dinners, no matter how dry and awful turkey meat is, objectively speaking.
And the great thing is that, actually, the food and drink I eat now is of very high quality compared to what we had to put up with in the sixties and seventies, my formative years. Cookers are more efficient, their thermostats more accurate, and recipes instantly available for nothing on the internet, but most importantly there is much more competition between distribution channels. We rarely buy our turkeys from butchers now, but deal direct with the farmer, again, mainly, because the Internet makes it easy to reach the public directly.
But the best thing of all about Christmas food is that, because everyone thinks that it should be cooked as well as possible, nobody asks me to cook it, so I am free to relax, write blog entries, and most importantly, eat, drink and be merry!
Happy Christmas Everyone!
