Great British Food Christmas 2024

A Pagan Christmas A lot of the ways we celebrate Christmas today have a foot in Pagan traditions. One of the things that has survived is ‘yule’. Greenery, like holly and ivy, would be brought inside, alongside the yule log, of course. This was a tree that was burnt for around 12 days. It’s celebrated today as a chocolate yule log. A Roman Christmas Roman Twelfth Night traditions endure today, including Twelfth Cake. A dried They also ate beaver, because of the shape of its tail. The great feasts that followed almost made up for all the fasting beforehand. One part of the Christmas table, described by Peter Brears in his book, Cooking and Dining inMedieval England , recalls the process of cooking a boar’s head as a centrepiece. The skin was removed, keeping it whole, and a couple of days before serving you’d stuff it with layers of forcemeat. Boars were hunted to extinction between the 13th and 17th Centuries, so often a pig’s head was used, painted with soot. This would be joined on the table by an array of roasted birds such as swans, peacocks and larks. A 17th Century Christmas There is little doubt that the series of almanacks and pamphlets produced from 1662 onwards by ‘Poor Robin’ were penned under the pseudonymby Essex writer WilliamWinstanley. He wrote and distributed themwith designs on keeping Christmas alive after Puritans banned celebrations. They describe lavish suppers on Christmas Eve, and wassail, which usually happened on Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and Twelfth Night. People would go fromhouse to house singing wassail songs and they would either take a wassail bowl with them, or it would be bean and pea would be baked inside. Whoever got the bean was the king, and the person who claimed the pea would be queen, presiding over the celebrations. There were a lot of charms in the cake as well, used for fortune telling. A Medieval Christmas Cooks were very creative in the Middle Ages, navigating around Advent, when meat and dairy were banned. Barnacle Goose (a type of bird) they regarded as fish because it ‘came from a barnacle’. 53 greatbr i t i shfoodawards.com FEATURE | CHRI STMAS