Editor’s letter
“CHRISTMAS WOULDN’T BE CHRISTMAS WITHOUT…OXTAIL,”
said Chelsea Moyo, Woolies’ food marketing manager. And this is how I have always felt about Christmas, too, that the food traditions are inseparable from the joy.
I held onto my own family rituals for years, even transporting them to London when I lived there briefly, but, over the years, I have also adapted. Slowly.
We started serving the gammon hot on Christmas Eve, forgoing the muchloved slaphakskeentjies, but embracing duck-fat roast potatoes with enthusiasm. At some point I started making a praline semifreddo from Jamie Oliver’s first cookbook as a trifle alternative. It stuck. One year, I was staying with my dad over Christmas and realised very late that he did not have a food processor to blitz the hazelnut-studded slab into crumbs. My father – who really loves that pudding – looked panicked, then grabbed a brick, stuck the slab into a plastic bag and beat it into submission.
I can’t remember when I started making salmon gravadlax, but that has remained too, as has a low-rent sweetcorn “soufflé”, and a rather extravagant platter of perfect endive leaves strewn with crumbled blue cheese and toasted nuts, then drizzled with my most prized balsamic vinegar.
When I lived alone, I used to invite family and friends over for a Christmas evening braai and we’d all squash onto my tiny terrace under Lion’s Head and eat butterflied lamb, panzanella and pavlova. My first Christmas with the Salad Dodger was in this flat. I had decided to break with tradition (again) and slow-cook a shoulder of pork to be eaten US-style with slaw. It was a huge piece of meat and needed a good six hours of cooking time. The Salad Dodger insisted he could do it on the Weber. I was sceptical, keeping a fire going for that long seemed ambitious, but these were the heady days of early romance and I capitulated. I won’t make that mistake again.
So this year, when I read and listened to what other people cherish as their non-negotiable Christmas dishes – trifle, gammon, oxtail, dombolo – what struck me was not how different the traditions are, but how much my own have changed.
I always thought the food rituals were the key to a joyful Christmas – sweating over the gammon bobbing in a cauldron of ginger beer, burying the salmon in a mound of salt and dill, rubbing the skins off of toasted hazelnuts. I believed that these happy moments from the past, recreated, would always bring joy. Then I read Nigella’s latest cookbook, in which she says of Christmas, “We cannot always rely on the past to give meaning to the present. Life has to be about making new memories, too.” And I realised I have already made new memories.
The cold Christmas lunch buffet of my childhood is long gone. And the hot Christmas Eve gammon and gravy in a manicured house will be replaced, this year, by an evening of warmth and homemade pizzas on the braai with a threeyear-old and a Jack Russell chasing each other around the garden.
With this minor epiphany came the realisation that the joy we get from the Christmas meal doesn’t come from eating the same dishes; it comes from being able to cook and eat with people we really love. And after months and months of enforced social distancing, this feels like an immense privilege. Indeed, there may never be another time in history when to simply spend time cooking and eating with others would feel so much like a gift. Treasure it.
Follow me on Instagram @KateWilsonZA
We would squash onto my tiny terrace and eat butterflied lamb and pavlova”