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Cooking like a Brit at Christmas takes a bit of translation and a lot of goose fat

By: Alison Gillmor

Posted: 12/10/2011 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

I find British cookbooks delicious but puzzling. Courgettes? Strong flour? Gas mark 4? At Christmastime, however, they become a truly festive mix of the tantalizing and the frustrating.

On the one hand, the English really know their Noel. In terms of food, much of what we now think of as Christmassy goes back to Charles Dickens. The Victorian novelist wrote about yuletide food as only someone who had known deprivation could. His 1843 classic, A Christmas Carol, is chock full of detailed descriptions of "cherry-cheeked apples," sage and onion stuffing, figs and French plums, candied fruits, roast goose, mince pies and "pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts."

This heritage has been taken up with gusto by modern British chefs. Gordon Ramsay can really cook a goose. Nigella Lawson, who embraces excess year round, goes completely over the top at Christmastime, garnishing her turkey with sausages wrapped in bacon (!) and covering everything in sight with brandy butter.

But while Brit cookbooks offer a holiday bounty of steamed puds and roasted potatoes, there are problems as well.

I've watched U.K. Christmas shows on the Food Network. Nigella is like a busty Christmas elf, seductively licking spoons and pouring great glugs of marsala. Jamie Oliver, who's always bashing things and blitzing things and banging them in the oven and cooking them full whack, gets very cheeky with the backside of a turkey.

On television, this feels like good fun. But in the black-and-white of a cookbook, the instructions can seem a bit, well, vague. Part of this is the usual gap between cooking shows and actual cooking. (I mean cooking-cooking. In your own kitchen. At 6 p.m. on a weeknight. With your children staring at you balefully.)

But part of this is cultural. Somebody -- this is one of those quotations that gets attributed to everyone -- once described England and America as two nations separated by a common language, and that seems to apply especially to the language of food. Canada, which has inherited some British cooking traditions and has at least a rudimentary understanding of the metric system, stands in between -- as usual.

Sometimes cookbooks from the big U.K. cooking stars are translated for the North American market -- or maybe mistranslated, since the blogosphere abounds with stories of what appear to be conversions gone tragically wrong, resulting in charred lamb and sludgy cakes. This is complicated by the fact that British ovens seem to be quite a different species, particularly the inscrutable Aga -- whose symbolic importance is seen in the fact that a certain kind of middle-class English domestic drama is called an "Aga saga"

Other times the unabashedly British versions of the books make their way over the pond, complete with their gammon and aubergines and mangetouts and other confusing ingredients. These often end up at a deep, deep discount at Homesense because would-be readers have been stymied by the measurement systems, particularly the fact that British bakers weigh their flour and sugar.

Still, this issue can be overcome with a good online converter and a little brush-up on your junior high math skills. If you want to cook a proper English Christmas dinner this year, the real challenge will be the little cultural differences -- the need for vast quantities of goose fat, that baffling British love of custard.

In the end, the food philosophy that should resonate on both sides of the Atlantic is Nigella's notion that Christmas is a time for "joyously undemanding" cooking. The delightfully pragmatic Nigella believes that perfection is not only unnecessary during the holidays, it can actually be detrimental.

Now that's an idea that ought to be universal. I guess I'll continue to find inspiration from my British cookbooks, without worrying too much about flawless results.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 10, 2011 G8

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