On Christmas Eve 1847 Dickens wrote to his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts, acknowledging a gift she had sent his wife, Catherine: “A thousand thanks for the notable turkey. I thought it was an infant sent her by mistake, when it was brought in. It looked so like a fine baby.”
Thank-you letters, the bane of many childhoods, have the marvellous function of showing future generations what people in the past rated as the top Christmas present. It tells us much about our social history that, overwhelmingly, the food gifts that had most economic and symbolic values were meat.
The artist JMW Turner, receiving Christmas gifts of goose, game or pies from the family of his late friend, Walter Fawkes, thanks them one year with a melancholic note of nostalgia for “the Yorkshire pie equal good to the Olden-time of Hannah’s”. In an earlier century, Samuel Pepys notes on Christmas Eve (1662), “This evening Mr Gauden sent me, against Christmas, a great chine of beef and three dozen of tongues.” (Don’t be deceived by the “Mr”; Gauden was the Navy victualler, Alderman Sir Denis Gauden.) Meat gifts made a subtle statement about the status of the giver – and flattered the recipient, who, it is implied, is in their social circle. Venison and feathered game were the preserve of the landed gentry, as the sale of it was either forbidden or strictly controlled by licence. Jane Austen’s comically nasty Mrs John Dashworth persuades her husband that he has no financial obligation to his half-sisters in Sense and Sensibility, downgrading them to “presents of fish and game, and so forth, whenever they are in season”, which announces both her mean spirit and her claim to status.
If I started out thinking this piece might be a lament for a lost tradition, surveying my friends and family has put me right. Judging by this admittedly biased sample, meat no longer rules. Without his lifestyle and household of servants willing to polish off any scraps, a “meat box” of the sort prized by Pepys – venison, beef and mutton – might be rather onerous. Farming friends give meat from their herd only where they know it will be welcome. Emily in Aberdeenshire proudly gifts local haggis, supposed food of the poor. Cheese, viewed by Mrs Beeton as embarrassingly low-rent, has leap-frogged meat in gift value. Maddie and her mum are busy making chutney to go with their Somerset cheddars. Roo’s parmesan and pistachio biscuits have achieved fame in our circle. “If I ever give birth,” said Rosa, “I want to be regaled with a cheeseboard immediately after” – an appropriate comment in this piece on Christmas gifting, I feel. The Virgin Mary could have said it, following Old Testament precedent: David is on his way to deliver a gift of ten cheeses when he meets Goliath.
I was particularly heartened because the teens and 20-somethings were enthusiastic bakers, makers and givers. Decorated gingerbread is a centuries-old favourite. Made with black treacle, which absorbs rather than loses moisture, it has excellent keeping qualities. It appears on the prized present rostrum along with hedonistic brownies, gluten-free macaroons, high-octane chocolate-and-orange truffles, glamorous white-chocolate cookies, Christmas cranberry chutney, and all kinds of jam. There are still hints of value that only land – even a back garden – can bestow. Precious honey from allotment bees. Garden quinces, a fruit still largely ignored by supermarkets, lend their pastes and jellies a beautiful amber glow and “money-can’t-buy” flavour.
Sugar is cheap and climate change hasn’t yet made cacao unaffordable, whereas a rib of grass-fed beef or a free-range goose is beyond reach for most. But if today we attach more importance to the homemade as gifts than to meat, it doesn’t simply reflect economic realities. Home-cooking takes up what so many of us have so little of – time. But these gifts are precious, too, because they are made and given with something that no tin of Quality Street will ever match: love.
“Stuffed: A Political History of What We Eat and Why It Matters” by Pen Vogler is out now in paperback
[See also: Red wine is less about colour and more about texture]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024