In the bleak midwinter…
Food historian Annie Gray explains how our 19th-century forebears reinvented Christmas for a new urban age
Victorian Bakers at Christmas TV BBC Two scheduled for December Between the 1830s and 1870s – not much longer than a generation – Christmas was reinvented. Unlike the riotous festivities of earlier eras, the Victorians, in the words of food historian Annie Gray, created a celebration that was “familyfriendly, hospitable... and charitable”.
Though the change was driven in part by Victoria and Albert’s “overt emphasis” on the nuclear family, this was also a celebration in keeping with the demands of a rapidly industrialising society. “A new focus only on Christmas Day was evident,” says Gray. “Already the 12 days [when farm workers downed tools] were no more, but now in an urban economy where people didn’t get paid on days off even Twelfth Night disappeared as a major feast day. Elements such as presentgiving, previously associated with new year, were shoehorned into one day.”
Still, as Gray, co-presenter Alex Langlands and a quartet of professional bakers explore in a one-off Victorian Bakers special, there were also gains. We owe “cards, crackers, flaming pudding, the Christmas post and the popularisation of the Christmas tree” to this era. “There was a great deal of false nostalgia [among later Victorians] about some mythical past in which everyone lived next door to everyone else, and all doors were flung open to the poor and needy. In reality, however, Christmas at the dawn of the Victorian era was a shadow of its previous self.”
This new emphasis on a single day meant that many winter dishes became “rebranded as Christmas foods”. Twelfth cakes, associated with the final day of festivities, gave way to Christmas cakes, and other recipes also changed. For instance, the amount of meat in mince pies dwindled, though for much of the 19th century the rich ate pies containing roast beef or neat’s (calf’s) tongue, while the poor had to make do with cheaper cuts or even tripe (stomach lining).
“Although our modern bakers weren’t used to handling it, and it is alarming to the uninitiated, tripe cooks out in the mix and you don’t notice the texture when it’s eaten,” says Gray. “The meat in all cases gives a depth of flavour – and a level of nutrition – which is lovely, and I much prefer Victorian mincemeat to the modern, rather insipid stuff.”
“In the new urban economy Twelfth Night disappeared as a major feast day”