Cooking up the modern Christmas
The poor joined goose clubs, saving all year for their coveted Christmas bird
The Victorians have the reputation for creating the modern Christmas. This is largely true, and Christmas became both more family-friendly and more commercialised in the almost 64 years Victoria was on the throne. It is to the Victorians that we owe the rebranding of Twelfth Cake to Christmas cake, and plum pudding to Christmas pudding. The decoupling of the pudding from roast beef, as well as its placing toward the end of the meal, would have been unthinkable in 1837, but was largely complete by 1901.
For the rich, beef remained a huge part of the Christmas spread, along with roast game. Meat in general was prestigious. The poor joined goose clubs, saving all year for their Christmas goose. In Charles Dickens’
A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit’s bird would have come from such a source. Stuffed and roasted in front of a fire, the normal accompaniments were potatoes and Brussels sprouts, the first printed recipes for which appeared in the 1840s. The wealthy still favoured unseasonal produce, including asparagus. Jerusalem artichoke soup also enjoyed a brief vogue as a Christmas(ish) starter.
Service style was changing too, from the simultaneous serving of many dishes at once that the Georgians had favoured to the new, sequential style known as à la Russe. But it was slow to catch on, especially at Christmas, for the lure of a groaning table was hard to resist (and à la Russe was ridiculously complicated and expensive for the vast majority of people, as it required many servants.)
Queen Victoria adopted the new style in the 1870s. Her Christmas dinners were remarkably consistent. Roast beef, woodcock pie, a raised game pie, a stuffed boar’s head and a huge brawn (a vertical slice of pig, rolled and poached) appeared every year on the sideboard. The main meal included sprouts, game and mince pies, now with very little meat.
Another common dish on upperclass tables was boiled turkey. In 1861 journalist and cookery book writer Isabella Beeton wrote: “Christmas dinner, with the middle classes of this empire, would scarcely be a Christmas dinner without its turkey.” However, it was still far from the majority choice.