There is no right way for Christmas to look
The festive season may be complicated, but the food needn’t be. Kate Young tells ELLA WALKER her recipe book will help
KATE YOUNG undoubtedly loves Christmas. Loves, loves, loves it. So much so that the Australian-born food writer has put together a collection of Yuletide recipes – 30 new, 20 swiped from her previous Little Library cookbooks – all cloth-bound in festive red, like a Dickensian classic, and interwoven with Christmas themed essays.
Drawing on food from fiction – like the Turkish delight Edmund gorges on in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe; roasted nuts inspired by The Mill On The Floss, and Moomin-style eggnog – as well as her own Christmases, including many a Swedish Christmas Eve feast, The Little Library Christmas is full of festive cheer. It’s also very sensitive to the fact not all Christmases are equal, let alone easy.
“I really love Christmas, but I totally appreciate that for a lot of people, it’s incredibly stressful,” says Kate, noting the annual flux in complicated family dynamics and at the other extreme, loneliness during a season where togetherness is seemingly mandatory. “It’s never as simple as ‘Christmas is always great’.”
And whether it’s great or not, it’s certainly going to be different this year. “I’m trying not to assume what Christmas Day is going to look like but the reality of the situation, I think we’re all painfully aware, is that we might all be restricted,” says Kate on the pandemic, which is set to outstrip even Scrooge in its disdain for Christmas wishes.
“I think it’s going to be a weird one, so I’m going to find ways to make it good.”
Food is one such way. Kate has split the recipes in her book into five sections, covering food as gifts; festive party fare; Christmas Eve goodness; all the December 25 trimmings; and edible ways to see in the new year.
“I wanted to write a book that gives you ideas for that day, but also covers all the time around it,” she explains, noting that yes, you may want to roast a whole goose, eschew turkey for chicken this year (“Cook a chicken, chickens are great!”), or go Swedish and make Jansson’s temptation (a potato and sprat bake). But it is also “completely fine, as we did a couple of years ago, to get a bunch of last-minute canapés for the freezer and just put them in the oven at various points throughout the day and eat that”, she says.
“There is joy to be had in making an incredible Christmas dinner, but if that is not something you’re going to find joyful, it does feel quite intense to have that pushed upon you. There’s always a chance to do it another way; there’s no right way for Christmas to look.”
Same goes for New Year’s Eve. It’s easy to feel pressurised into thinking you have to drink all the champagne and dance until your tights wear through, but Kate says there’s magic in a low-key New Year. Especially when it involves making her cheesy orzo using the nubbly odds and ends of your Christmas cheeseboard.
Now based in the UK, Kate grew up in the Nineties in Australia, and Christmas Day was “monstrously hot” and sunny, and spent largely in the pool.
“December is a beautiful time of year for food in Australia – all the tropical fruit is out, so you’d have mangoes; it would be extraordinary. But we would still have plum pudding because my greatgrandma made Christmas puddings every year. I still use her recipe, which is in the book.”
Kate hopes The Little Library Christmas offers space and ideas, not festive mandates.
“I want the book to very much feel like a usable, practical friend in the kitchen,” she says.
“I want it to be a Christmas book for people who don’t necessarily have to have completely uncomplicated feelings about Christmas,” she adds. And in a complicated year, there’s comfort to be found in that.
THE Little Library Christmas by Kate Young is published by Head of Zeus, priced £15. Photography by Lean Timms. Available now.