Pass the peacock pie
Christmas dinner is not to everyone’s taste, writes Darrel Bristow-Bovey
I’m in Lisbon for the next few months and this will be my first European Christmas. Christmas is always a tricky time, happy and sad. It takes you to the past and the past is always melancholy because it has passed, so this year I’m thinking about food instead.
“What do Portuguese people eat on Christmas?” I asked the woman in the queue at the grocery store the other day.
She said a Portuguese word that I didn’t quite catch, so I made the international sign of narrowing my eyes and smiling like a simpleton and leaning closer with my head slightly cocked. She wiggled her hands in front of my face, which I thought meant she was planning to catch and eat some sort of snake, but turned out to signify a pair of salted cod.
I’m keen to have an authentic local yuletide experience, but not if it involves tucking into a bowl of rehydrated fish biltong that only became popular in Portugal in the first place because you could carry it in your wooden ships for months on end without it going off, like some kind of 15th-century Spam.
I know a chap in Barrydale in the Western Cape who plans to eat a peacock this Christmas. There are plenty of them mooching around that neck of the words, making a racket and pecking at his windows, and he has his eye on a particularly troublesome character. He’s done his research. Peacocks, he says, were once a staple Christmas meal in wealthy European households, often baked in big crusty pies and served with the head reattached at one end and the feathers splayed and reattached at the other. You need a big table and high ceilings to serve
peacock pie. You also need a strong stomach, because the meat is apparently tough and peculiarly coarse, like wet wood, and blamed by contemporary physicians for causing indigestion and shortening the life of those who ate it.
Peacocks were eventually displaced as Christmas tucker by turkeys, after they’d been brought back from the New World in the 1520s. Henry VIII, who never met a meal he didn’t like, was one of the first people to eat turkey for Christmas lunch, but when Scrooge buys a turkey for Bob Cratchit’s family in A Christmas Carol, it’s still unusual fare. The traditional meal remained a goose until Edward VII decided he liked a roasted gobbler on Christmas, and all England and her empire followed suit.
My dad loved a turkey. The closest I ever saw him come to crying was when we visited his sister in Joburg and she served cold meats on Christmas day. It became the occasion for one of his life lessons. “Never accept an invitation to Christmas lunch,” he told me that night. “Keep the turkey under your own control.”
There are worse Christmas meals than cold cuts, I suppose. I don’t intend to spend many late Decembers in Greenland, where they have a range of traditional Christmas feasts, including mattak, a dish of sliced whale, usually raw but sometimes breaded, served with a festive stuffing of blubber. Which whale, would you like to know as you draw up your shopping list? Bowhead, mainly, although some favour the aromatic subtleties of beluga and the adventurous enjoy a narwhal.
If you politely turn away a second ladle of mattak at the Greenland yule table to save space for the kiviac, you are playing a fool’s game. Kiviac is the raw flesh of the auk, a flightless seabird that swims like a fish and also smells like one. But of course you can’t just grab a dead auk and call it kiviak. No, no, the meat must be meticulously prepared by wrapping it in the skin of a dead seal, burying it under a pile of rocks in September and allowing it to decompose and ferment until Christmas day.
On our first Christmas together, someone who loved me once roasted a turkey. I didn’t know this, but she’d never roasted a turkey before. She’d never roasted anything before, but I’d told her about my dad’s life lesson and she wanted to make a turkey for me. She put the bird in the oven upside down and turned it to the wrong heat. She spent the day prodding at it, becoming more and more upset because it wouldn’t cook. Finally I found her sitting on the floor, staring through the glass door of the oven, trying to cook it with her mind. I sat down beside her and explained that I don’t even like turkey that much, that my dad’s life lesson is just a memory, that it’s an idea more than a meal. And then I saw she was crying because she felt she’d let me down, and my heart shattered into a million pieces.
Christmas is cruel. It piles your past upon someone else’s past and creates demands of the present that can never be met. Be kind to each other this Christmas. Get out as quickly as you can, and don’t have any turkey yourself.