Food - Bee Wilson says that fancy festive fare is not all it's cooked up to be
Christmas food can only fully be enjoyed from a state of deprivation - but not too much. For the pampered modern child reared on poussin and rack of lamb, what
glamour remains in the plate of turkey and sprouts? All year, they have been stuffed at the table, like geese for their livers. There is one final push on Christmas morning. As the church bells ring, they devour the pound of chocolate truffles and packet of marzipan pigs that Mummy tucked into their stockings to fill up the space between a Psion personal organiser and a Siemens mobile phone. The nuts and clementines in the foot are discarded. That delicate French carol "Quelle est cette odeur agreable" is tinkling on Radio 3. The real odour, however, is made by poor Damien being sick in the downstairs loo. Never mind, a small glass of champagne (it is Christmas!) and a few canapes will revive the poor poppet. Then, smoked salmon. What, darling, you can't manage any Marsala gravy with your turkey, sausages, red cabbage, bread sauce, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, buttered Brussels sprouts with chestnuts, porcini dauphinoise and cranberry compote? (I think he's coming down with something, they whisper.) Now for the pudding. Would you rather some iced rum parfait, a slice of Christmas pudding soaked in amaretto and vodka, some creme brulee (yes, it is real gold leaf!) or a very light red wine jelly with whipped cream? A little of each? But Damien has gone very red and is banging his mobile phone against his own head. His parents sometimes wonder why he doesn't find Christmas more "magical".
If the literature of childhood is to be believed, the magic of Christmas food comes only out of hunger. Think of Little Women, where the girls sacrifice their Christmas breakfast, or E Nesbitt's stories about the Bastables, in which the children save up all their money to make a (truly disgusting) Christmas pudding for charity. At the beginning of Great Expectations, the orphan Pip has to steal some "wittals" for the escaped convict in the graveyard. Pip's usual tea is half a slice of meagrely buttered bread, given grudgingly by his sister. The thrill - and terror - of stealing food from her Christmas larder is therefore considerable. "I stole some bread, some rind of cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I tied up in my pocket handkerchief . . .), some brandy from a stone bottle . . . a meat bone with very little on it, and a beautiful round compact pork pie." Oh, to be excited by half a jar of mincemeat!
My favourite author on Christmas food is Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote about growing up across America with her pioneer farmer parents. One year, when snowed in, they have only oyster crackers (a kind of dry biscuit) and soup on Christmas Day. Another year, the greatest treat is candy, made from drawing patterns of hot maple syrup on handfuls of snow. In Little House on the Prairie, the family is living near a stormy creek. Their friend, Mr Edwards, a bachelor, is due to join them for lunch, and Pa and Ma are depending on him to bring the girls their Christmas candy, but there's a flood and "Pa shook his head, and said a man would risk his neck, trying to cross that creek now". They are wondering how to break it to the girls that their stockings will be empty when Mr Edwards walks in, sopping wet, having swum across the stormy creek with the gifts from Santa Claus on his head. Reading about the girls opening their modest packages of tin cups, peppermint candy and heart-shaped cakes makes me cry every time. "The cakes were too pretty to eat. Mary and Laura just looked at them. But at last Laura turned hers over, and she nibbled a tiny nibble from underneath, where it wouldn't show. And the inside of that little cake was white! . . .The cups and the cakes and the candy were almost too much. They were too happy to speak."
It doesn't do to be too sentimental about deprived Christmases. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, there are now more poor people in Britain (measured as those earning less than 40 per cent of the average) than when Labour came to power in May 1997. Despite all the talk of "tackling child poverty", halving teenage pregnancies, turning the sea into lemonade, giving each toddler his or her own laptop computer and each Post Office its own Millennium Dome, more children will be facing a poor Christmas this year. In many cases, it will be impoverished in every sense. The modest sugar-cakes of Little House on the Prairie seem thrilling only because they are unlike the wholesome bread and corn that the family usually eats. It is hard to detect the thrill of Iceland Turkey and dried-up economy mince pies, or to see them as much different from, let alone much better than, the turkey drummers and economy apple pies they eat the rest of the year.
Christmas also presents the frightening spectre of living way beyond one's means, of splurging in one go on unenjoyable luxuries and accumulating the plastic debt that will make the next year as burdensome and worry-laden as the last. Much better to swap your weekly Lottery spend for a stake in a goose club, as described in the marvellous Sherlock Holmes story The Adventures of the Blue Carbuncle. Do goose clubs still exist? They should. You could hardly fail to savour your Christmas meat if you had paid for it bit by bit, throughout the year, prudently anticipating each week the pleasure it will eventually give. By contrast, you can hardly begin to enjoy your Christmas meat when you know it will be followed, as in that horrible advertisement, by great vats of imprudent and undesired pudding, pies, sherry, spirits, cakes, nuts, lager and, finally, indigestion remedy.
When the TV chefs urge you to mortgage your children in the name of wild mushroom and truffle stuffings from which no one except the supermarket that sells you the ingredients will really benefit; when anyone tells you to buy expensive Belgian chocolates instead of the Quality Street you may prefer; when an internal voice makes you feel guilty for not providing quite as many roasted chestnuts as in those feasts in the glossy supplements; when myth-makers cry that you must have port-and-stilton dip at the ready in case of that fictitious creature, the "unexpected guest" - stop up your ears. Eat what you like, and what you can afford, and be as merry as you can.
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