Although this menu gives a nod to the traditional British Christmas feast, departures have been made to emphasize the use of new world foods. There are no pigs in blankets and no bread sauce on this menu, and the traditional Christmas pudding has, like Cinderella’s coach, turned into a pumpkin.
CHARLES DICKENS’ OWN PUNCH RECIPE
The first rums were produced in Barbados in the 1600s. The drink was made from molasses, a byproduct of sugarcane production. Rum production was established in the American colonies, especially in New England, as a key part of the triangular trade, where molasses from the Caribbean was used to distill rum, both in the islands and in the colonies, which was traded for slaves in Africa who were sent back to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations, completing the triangle. Rum was the primary export of New England and was the drink of choice in the region.
The pineapple (Ananas comosus) is believed to have originated in the Amazon rainforest in South America, in the area that is now southern Brazil, northern Argentina, and Paraguay. The fruit was domesticated by native South Americans before Columbus arrived in 1493.
The domesticated cashew tree is native to the new world (Brazil) and now is commercially cultivated mainly in Brazil and India. The seeds, rich in oil and distinctively flavored, are commonly used in South and Southeast Asian cuisine and are a characteristic ingredient of numerous chicken and vegetarian dishes of southern India.
SHRIMP COCKTAIL WITH TABASCO AND WORCESTERSHIRE COCKTAIL SAUCE
Tomatoes were not grown in England until the 1590s. Gerard’s Herbal, one of the earliest discussions of the tomato in England, was published in 1597. Gerard knew the tomato was eaten in Spain and Italy but, nevertheless, he believed that, as a relative of the nightshade family, it was poisonous. Gerard’s views were influential and the tomato was considered unfit for eating for many years in Britain and its North American colonies.
Prawn cocktail, as it was originally known, was an appetizer of cold boiled shrimp arranged dangling around the rim of a cocktail glass. In the center of the glass, atop a bed of shredded lettuce, was a tomato-based dip for the shrimp, later known as cocktail sauce. The creator of this dish was Britain’s flamboyant celebrity chef Fanny Cradock, who rose to prominence in the 1950s following the end of World War II. After beginning her career as an anonymous restaurant critic, Fanny wrote a food column for the Daily Telegraph from 1950 to 1955 under the title Bon Viveur (see Prawn Cocktail for more on Fanny).
ROASTED TURKEY WITH OYSTER STUFFING
When European settlers first came across the large birds native to the forests of North America they incorrectly identified them as a type of guineafowl, which they also called Turkey fowl because the birds were imported to Central Europe through Turkey. The name stuck, in abbreviated form, even after turkeys were determined to in fact be related to the grouse family. In Turkey, however, the birds are called hindi, which means “from India,” and in India, a turkey is called a peru. The Arabic word for turkey means Greek chicken, the Greek word means French chicken, and the French word means Indian chicken (The French originally referred to turkeys as coq d’inde which later was abridged to dinde.) New world critters seem to have created a fair amount of confusion in other parts of the planet.
Sarah Edington, author of the British National Trust’s Complete Traditional Recipe Book, notes that she included dishes that “the British not only eat today, but have eaten over the past 600 years. That includes turkey, which had a fixed price in the London markets by the 1550s.” Henry VIII preferred turkey over peacock or swan as his bird of choice for feast days, although it wasn’t until the 20th century that it supplanted goose as the traditional bird at Christmas for most Brits.
You may remember that in Charles Dickens’ 1843 classic A Christmas Carol Ebenezer Scrooge received the Christmas spirit from his ghostly visitors, looked into a London butcher shop’s window and exclaimed, “Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize turkey that was hanging up there?… Go and buy it!” He purchased the bird and, in an effort to redeem himself, presented it to the impoverished Cratchits for their Christmas dinner. It’s interesting to note that turkey, in Dickens’ time, was far more expensive than the usual Christmas goose. The reverse is true now, goose is double the price of turkey.
CLAPSHOT (mashed potatoes with rutabaga or turnips)
Potatoes originated in the highlands of the Andes in South America. The Incas cultivated potatoes as early as 1,800 years ago, and the Aymara Indians developed over 200 varieties of the potato at elevations above 10,000 feet.
In the mid-1500s, Spanish colonists introduced potatoes to Europe and, late in the 16th century, Sir Walter Raleigh returned to England from the Americas carrying potatoes to the table of Queen Elizabeth I. Easily cultivated, potatoes became a staple crop, which downgraded their status from a pricey exotic vegetable to food for the poor. Irish cooking authority Darina Allen notes that “With only an acre or two of land a farmer could grow enough potatoes to support his whole family.” By the 18th century the potato became the base food for at least one third of the population in Ireland, especially in the winter. By the end of the 18th century, roughly 40% of the Irish ate no solid food other than potatoes.
In 1846-47, an epidemic of potato blight disease caused a million or more Irish to die in one of the deadliest famines in human history and, within a decade, two million more had fled Ireland. By the 1960s, Ireland’s population was still half of what it had been in 1840 and today it remains the only country in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people than it did in 1840 (see a short history of the potato).
A November, 2011 issue of Smithsonian Magazine states that, “By feeding rapidly growing populations, (potatoes) permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950. The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West.”
FRENCH BEANS AND CHESTNUTS
Green beans originated in the Andes, in what is now Peru, thousands of years ago. Native tribes migrated and spread the beans throughout the Americas. Christopher Columbus brought green beans to Europe from his second voyage to the New World in 1493.
The chestnut tree, Castanea sativa, was first introduced to Europe via Greece. The majority of the chestnut trees found in North America now come from native European or Chinese stock, but indigenous peoples feasted on North America’s own variety, Castanea dentata, long before colonizers brought their varieties to North America. In 1904, diseased Asian chestnut trees planted on Long Island, New York, carried a fungus hitchhiker that nearly devastated the North American chestnut population, which at one time numbered in the billions. Only a few groves in California and the Pacific Northwest escaped the blight.
CRANBERRY, APPLE AND WALNUT CONSERVE
Cranberries are native to North America. They were cultivated by native people both for food and for medicine, and it is believed that indigenous tribes introduced them to the Pilgrims.
Pumpkins are native to Central America and are one of the oldest known cultivated plants in the new world. The oldest evidence of pumpkins are fossilized seeds and stems found in caves in Mexico that date back to between 7,000 and 5,500 B.C. They were one of the first widely cultivated food sources for native Americans, along with other squash species, maize, and beans. Pumpkins spread across the new world, reaching the plains and woodland Indians of central North America by about three to four thousand years ago.
