STUFF THE TURKEY!

Bland and time-consuming (before the actual consuming begins), turkey’s off our writer’s festive menu, in favour of beef!

TURKEY is a trial. If you leave aside, for a moment, the problematic question of sourcing and ordering and collecting, there’s the preparation of the stuffing, the cooking, the worry that the bird won’t quite fit into the oven, the timing, the resting, the trimmings…

It’s no fun at all. And then there’s the pretence that turkey is delicious. It’s not. A really good freerange chicken, ideally so free range that it has simply wandered around a farmyard before being summarily dispatched, is altogether a better designed fowl with far superior flavour.

If you are few for Christmas, this is the way to go. A proper chicken with proper flavour and moist meat, the right proportion of meat to the bones, is quicker and easier to cook, and will give much more pleasure.

I should stress that my childhood Christmases all revolved around the turkey: a fine turkey, always delivered just in time by my mother’s cousin, the butcher. It would hang in the garage for a day or two, distinctly dead, clammy, heavy and slightly sinister. Given my mother’s natural sense of hospitality and generosity, it was always enormous, as if it had been fed on all sorts of good, fattening things, plus a generous dose of steroids.

And, yes, I’ll admit that it always smelled good – beguiling even – as it cooked. And boy, did it cook. For what seemed like days. Even as a small child with no role in the kitchen other than to be a somewhat enchanted spectator, I knew the cooking of the turkey was not something to be undertaken lightly. It was the kind of task that came with generations of lore, superstition even. I’m sure that even my long deceased greatgrandmother had something to do with the process.

ALTHOUGH the focus of childhood Christmas dinners was always the turkey – how could it be otherwise when it physically dominated the dining table like a roasted colossus from a Norman Rockwell painting? – it was never the focus for my juvenile taste buds.

Then, as now, I preferred chicken, and chicken was always good in those days, when it was far from being an everyday meat. It was more moist, more full of taste, even easier to eat.

No, what I enjoyed most at those far-off Christmas dinners was ham. Full of salty, intense piggy flavour with the thrill of a brown sugar and mustard crust with cloves on the outside edge of each succulent slice.

However, it would have been both impolite and imprudent to mention this in my family circle. Opinions were not invited because having turkey at Christmas was, for us, as natural as night following day. It was just the way it was. And, for most people, it still is.

The turkey trial, however, involved not just the palaver of getting the thing on to the table, along with the giblet (ugh!) gravy, but also what can only be called ‘the aftermath’.

In those days, every household had a handy, if wildly optimistic, booklet on how to survive the aftermath of nuclear war, the spectre of which was always present.

And frankly, turning your back to the blast and hiding under a table with the windows taped shut would have been a doddle compared to the endless turkey sandwiches which, as a matter of duty, had to be consumed.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was what passed for recycling. It went on for days on end.

This is what I vowed to avoid as an adult, in my own family home. We have had an occasional turkey, I’ll admit. Fine, organically grown beasts from a local farmer; we even knew the field in which they had grown. But still, they failed to convert me.

The aroma of roasting turkey, I will admit, is seductive. Combined with a glass of champagne, it conspires to make one of most effective aperitifs in the world. But it is as nothing to what a roasting goose will do to your gastric juices.

At Christmas, we look to goose and beef for the festive feast. And I use the word ‘feast’ advisedly. It’s essential that your yuletide meat has a sense of feasting about it. Goose, as its vast payload of delicious fat renders and drips into the roasting pan, or beef, as its thick layer of fat is turned into a kind of honeycomb of savoury scrumptiousness in the heat of the roasting oven, are meats worthy of such a feast.

Turkey, dry and vast and monolithic, is not so much a feast as a form of mass catering. And, for one such as me, there’s the question of wine. At Christmas, I feel I have an excuse to be almost boringly classical and traditional. I want to drink Burgundy or Bordeaux, and neither will do any favours for turkey.

YES, there are reds that will do with turkey but you really need a luscious white, maybe a New World oaky Chardonnay or a Viognier, to moisten that dry old stick of a fowl. A Saint-Emillion will hide and start to cry when faced with the challenge.

This year, it’s going to be beef for us. A rib-eye joint, on the bone, aged for almost six weeks and marginally more expensive, perhaps, than the best turkey, but so much more giving in every sense. Flavour, moisture (we like it pretty rare), and that essential sense of feasting. There’s more to it than that. It will be cooked, by me, over charcoal on our battered old barbecue (a faux Weber with a domed lid that will just about fit over the joint), come hail, shine or deluge.

The ceremony will take place outside the kitchen window or, if the weather dictates, in the shelter of the barn. An umbrella may be required.

The reason for this is, largely, tradition (a recent one) but also because it produces a smoky crust and very moist, rare flesh. It frees up lots of space in the Aga for the essential roast spuds and Yorkshire puds.

The downside, as any barbecue cook will have twigged, lies in the matter of gravy. I’ll have to roast some beef bones ahead of time and make the gravy from those. But that’s no great hardship.

And you know what? This Christmas meal – or, rather, feast – feels more Irish than turkey, that essentially American bird.

After all, aren’t beef and butter what we do best in this green land of ours?

I’ve always liked being slightly out of step. It’s my default position (and not just because I’m dyspraxic). So being a bit out of the mainstream at Christmas is fine by me. It just tastes better and the leftovers, because of the carefully judged size of the joint, don’t get left over for long.

So, there you have it. And remember: if you’ve suddenly seen the light about turkey, there’s plenty of great beef out there. Especially this week!