Ranking the top holiday treats
For Christmas dinner in 1847, Fort Edmonton served a boiled buffalo hump and a boiled buffalo calf, white fish in buffalo marrow and dried moose nose. This was a demonstration of the available bounty, says McGill food historian Nathalie Cooke. But holiday food traditions are in constant flux. This can cause confusion. Is the centrepiece of the meal supposed to be turkey or an expensive cut of beef, for example? Or ham? Or goose? Cooke points to a 19th-century article that declared beef most proper, since it symbolizes the oxen that knelt for the newborn Christ (so much for reverent cows earning any mercy). Another early 20th-century recipe highlights two meats at once, sort of, by cooking lamb in the shape of a duck. Today, nostalgia is pretty much the only common holiday ingredient. Problem is, in this fog of sentimentality it’s hard to tell if our memories of Christmas comestibles match reality. Do they taste any good? Here, I bring you the definitive ranking of holiday dishes.
10. Mashed potatoes
Anyone who dislikes this dish is thinking about those other mashed potatoes — the lumpy ones, the sticky ones with too little butter, the ones left to sit too long in a bowl covered with a dish towel, or, worst of all, the abomination that is “smashed potatoes.” A cook who tells you this dish is better with the skins on is lying. Do not be lazy. Come to the light. Peel your potatoes.
9. Mint Nanaimo bars
This time-worn national dessert is best with mint icing, which should be a shade of green not found in nature. The more radioactive-looking the better.
8. Bûche de Noël
This majestic tradition has been struck down by cheap grocery store imitators. Try the real thing, as described in the Oxford Companion to Food: A rolled sponge cake with buttercream, coloured with chocolate or coffee to look like wood bark. Gentle carvings in the icing to look like branches. Maybe even a few meringue mushrooms scattered around the cake plate.
7. Spiral ham
A marvel of modern engineering developed, of course, in the 1950s. Watch the YouTube videos of a mechanic knife caressing a honey ham and sing, “For yonder breaks a new glorious morn!”
6. Chinese takeout
This is an exercise in letting go, in realizing your own limitations as a cook and a human being. Plus, cold, leftover Chinese takeout is a decent cure for a Christmas morning hangover.
5. Tourtière
The king of pies, no matter the style: Thick with cubed meat like they do in Lac-Saint-Jean, thin with ground meat like they do in Montreal. As for the exalted few cooking Cipaille — the multi-layered, underappreciated cousin of tourtière — I salute you.
4. Smoked Fish
Blitzed into a dip, laid out in strips or rolled into pinwheels, smoked fish is a perfect overture to a holiday meal.
3. Shortbread
It’s butter and flour and sugar and yet, when it crumbles into that slick film on the roof of my mouth, I am finally present and at peace. It is Christmas.
2. Puff pastry
This is the great champion of ordinary things. It lifts them up, hugs them, whispers, “You are a $5 wheel of Brie and you are beautiful.” 1. Spiked eggnog How much rum can a glass of eggnog sustain before curdling? I asked a food scientist, but the better answer is the one you find on your own.