FeSTIVe COOKING
PRUE LEITH
We are sadly unambitious about festive cooking. It’s not that we are too busy for elaborate feasts, or that Waitrose has taken over Christmas. It’s that we’ve become keen on good taste. Pity. I like a bit of vulgar display on special occasions.
The Romans showed off with food like anything. Not that everyone approved. Horace had a go: ‘If a peacock is served you, you will prefer it to a hen. You are seduced by sheer vanities, since this rare fowl costs its weight in gold and offers the spectacle of a multicoloured tail, as though that had anything at all to do with the question. Do you eat his plumage that you praise so highly?’ What a spoilsport.
The fictional Trimalchio in Petronius’s Satyricon serves a hare got up with wings to look like Pegasus. Pastry gravy boats shaped like satyrs with phalluses for spouts drip gravy. Three live pigs are driven into the dining room; the guests choose which they’ll have for dinner and in an impossibly short time the hog comes back, roasted, and Trimalchio feigns fury that the cook, in his haste, has failed to gut it. It is immediately paunched and out tumble intestines made of perfectly cooked sausages. Great stuff. Or stuffing.
In the Middle Ages a favourite wedding subject for edible sculptures (bizarrely called ‘subtleties’) was a grossly pregnant woman in the act of childbirth, modelled in marzipan. Sometimes mediaeval constructions were not for eating, such as pies concealing live birds — a great trick unlikely to be approved by the RSPCA. You fill the pie crust with bran. When cooked, make a hole in the bottom. Shake the bran out. Replace it with birds. Better still, at a banquet in 1433 in Lille, 28 musicians, each with a different instrument, emerged from a giant pie merrily playing. Puts a single showgirl bursting out of a birthday cake rather in the shade.
There is also an account of a new-laid egg tucked into the cavity of a pigeon, which is then put into a goose, the goose into a piglet, the piglet into a lamb and the lamb into an ox. After the ox is roasted it is magically cleaved in two by a mighty swordsman and a chick, hatched by the warmth, emerges. It’s nonsense, of course, but I like the Russian Doll principle, so here’s my more modest, and delicious, Christmas turkey version: Get the butcher to ‘tunnel-bone’ a 20lb turkey, removing the carcass while leaving the legs intact, and completely bone (legs included) an 8lb goose, a 4lb chicken, a pheasant, a partridge or a pigeon and a quail. (‘Tunnel-boning’ is working from both ends rather than ‘open-boning’, when you open the beast out flat.) Make your stuffing (without dried crumbs which swell and cause bursting). Stuff the quail, then push it into the partridge, then the partridge into the pheasant, pheasant into the chicken, chicken into the goose, goose into the turkey. Use the stuffing to fill the gaps. (There’s a danger that the ends will be 90 per cent stuffing, so rather settle for a balloon-shaped bird.) Sew up both ends and tie the drumsticks together so they are roughly parallel — if they stick out sideways it looks vaguely rude. Cover with two layers of muslin soaked in melted butter (which will do the basting for you and through which the turkey will brown). Roast at 350°F/180°C, or gas mark 4 until the juices run clear. (Start checking after three hours the shape and amount of stuffing will affect the cooking time.) Feeds 20, but is great cold.
Of course not everyone gets a bit of quail, pigeon or pheasant since they are in the middle. A fairer and more manageable version which is dead easy to carve is a ballotine: open-bone the turkey, lay the meat and stuffing evenly all over, roll it up, sew the ends, tie the roll at intervals with string and wrap in buttered muslin. Or stuff the turkey with cooked ham, chestnuts and stuffing so you get the whole Christmas dinner in one slice. A doddle for the carver. But it looks like a stuffed bolster, and is not so much to boast about.
Or you can hand the whole business of stuffing over to www.seldomseenfarm.co.uk whose Three Bird Roast (goose, chicken and pheasant) comes oven-ready. Telephone 0116 259 6742.
I like the idea of ‘conceits’ in cooking. The unattractively named but classic Poulet Crapaudine is a chicken disguised as a toad (with prunes for eyes), whiting or codling en colère is a whole fish cooked biting its tail, Négresse en Chemise is a chocolate pud half covered in cream, etc. None is very suitable for Christmas.
But how about a cannonball plum pudding, cooked in a cloth? The pudding cloth was a great innovation. A Monsieur Mission in 1690 wrote, ‘Blessed be he that invented pudding. Ah, what an excellent thing is an English pudding.’ I cheat a bit with polythene, because puds cooked solely in a cloth get soggy round the edges. So: flour a large, doubled muslin cloth (or a single linen tea towel which, be warned, will never be the same again), dollop the pudding mix on to it, and tie it up like Dick Whittington’s bundle. Then slit open two large freezer bags, and use the plastic as a kind of not-too-tight waterproof raincoat outside the cloth, again tying at the neck. (Don’t be tempted to use polythene bags unslit, the straight bottom and corners will ensure a lopsided pudding.) The other secret of a perfectly round pudding is to suspend the pud in the water, like the baby in the stork’s beak. If it sits on the saucepan bottom it will emerge shaped like a turban. When done (normal cooking times apply), suspend to dry.
Finally, here’s how to get a decent conflagration without setting your eyebrows alight. Have the pud ready on the platter with a real holly sprig stuck in it (important: fake holly is probably noxious and certainly smells horrible when set aflame). Put a coffee cup of brandy into the microwave to get the flammable fumes going but don’t heat above lukewarm or you’ll dissipate the alcohol.
Carry everything in on a tray. No one will notice what you are up to because by then everyone will be full of Christmas cheer. With your back to the revellers, light the brandy in the saucepan, then pour it flaming over the pud, holly and all. Place in front of whoever is holding forth. He/she will have no option but to start the clapping.
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