Out with the new, in with the old

f you read the papers in December, I you might be forgiven for thinking that the British Christmas meal is utterly uniform: turkey, roast potatoes and sprouts, with Christmas pudding to follow, plus mince pies and Christmas cake. But only around 70 per cent of us eat turkey, even fewer opt for sprouts, and Christmas pudding is in decline.

However, for many of us, today’s typical Christmas meal is almost identical to menus from the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s. And in the idealised presentation with all of the main course dishes served on the table at once, it isn’t that far removed from the dinners of 250 years ago.

2020 was challenging, and 2021 may be the year of either sudden shortages or panic-bought pastry. Will this provoke greater change?

These aren’t the only issues facing the Christmas dinner in the 21st century. The average meal is around 5,000 calories and meat-heavy: reflective of earlier, more physical eras when such feasts were much anticipated one-offs. And it requires a huge amount of work (often still reliant on female labour), for when it came together, from around 1870 to 1940, in middle-class homes, servants – even if only a daily char – were still the aspiration, if not the norm.

A trot through Christmas dinners in the past shows that our apparently traditional meal is anything but. Whether rich or poor, we’ve eaten a vast range of foods at Christmas in previous centuries, and although that range has narrowed in the last 200 years, the emphasis on certain staples is more in the mind than on the table. The ideal 21st-century Christmas dinner is old-fashioned, partly as it is a time of huge nostalgia and memory-making, and partly precisely because we only eat it once a year.

It doesn’t have to be this way though. If we truly embrace the past, our repertoire would expand immensely. So try the raised pies, hearty stews, glazed vegetables and rich ice creams. For if we really liked turkey and trimmings, surely we’d eat it more than once a year?

The average meal is around 5,000 calories, reflective of earlier eras when such grand feasts were one-offs

Although the modern Christmas dinner is expected to feature turkey and Brussels sprouts, these foods aren’t on every table. Only 70 per cent of Britons eat turkey, for instance

A dining table set with traditional Elizabethan foods. “Try the raised pies, hearty stews, glazed vegetables and rich ice creams,” Annie Gray urges