Christmas Dinner

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 149, 21 December 1926, Page 23

Christmas Dinner

When to Eat—and What.

Few of us would quarrel- over the menu of ths ideal Christmas dinner. Roast turkey, plum-pudding, mince pies, we should agree, are the essential dishes. As for anything else —let that be, as the cookery books have it, "according to taste." !' For my part, writes C.H. :in "Public .Opinion," I would Ask nothing else to [ eat, but I would specify the time. The [ideal Christmas dinner, I think, should Ibe served somewhere between 5 and 6 o'clock in the afternoon. This most ■joyous feast of all the year is not one to be eaten like an ordinary meal. A midday meal almost inevitably is followed by. an anti-climax; long hours of gastronomic and mental satiety which produce 'an impression of unfulfilled ideal. The evening drags. The climax' of the feast has been reached too soon. To dine at 7 or 8 is to be unfair to the children, who, of all the Christmas party, should most be considered. They are over-hungry before this meal, and over-tired after it. Therefore, I hold that the ideal hour is soon after 5 o'clock. A great occasion this Yuletide dinner, one that may be counted among our oldest traditions. Save for those few bleak years of Puritan domination when as the old rhyme put it, Plum broth was Popish, and mince-pie— 0 that was flat idolatry, men have rejoiced over their Christmas dinners for fourteen hundred years. But perhaps tho Puritan zealots did not all practice as they preached about December 25th —they would never call it Christmas. It is curious to realise that the traditional fare is comparatively modern. hln the old days, great joints of beef, boars' heads and , peacocks, _ geese, capons and pheasants soaked in ambergris, and pics of carps' tongues, formed the customary dishes at the Christmas board. Turkey was almost unknown in England three hundred

years ago, and as for plum-pudding—-that is a mere upstart. It is true that it is descended from an ancient dish: Plum porridge or plum broth. But our ancestors ate this as soup at the beginning of the dinner. There is a recipe for this dish in a. cookery book of Queen' Anne's time, which gives, as its ingredients, a leg and shin of beef, six. penny loaves, cut thin; five pounds each of currants and raisins and two of prunes; and among a host, of other seasonings, a quart of sack and a quart of claret. This must have been a wonderful broth! Only the mince-pie has "a really long pedigree. It certainly was well known in the spacious days of the Tudora; and it was not long after Queen Elizabeth of blessed memory had died that George Wither sang:— Now all our neighbours' chimneys smoke, ' • And Christmas blocks are burning; Their ovens they with bak't moats choke, : And all their spits aro turning. Without the door let sorrow lie, And if, for cold, it hap to dio, Wco'le bury 't in a Christmas pye, And evermore be merry. » The Christmas pye was a mincc-pio. Let us, too, follow old Withers advice.