It’s all gravy in our kitchen if I keep my beak out

ONE of the posh papers published a Yuletide pull-out-and-keep supplement on how to cook Christmas dinner.

I offered it to Mrs R as a possible help in her forthcoming kitchen ordeal. I should have known better.

“If I don’t know to cook a turkey after all these years...” she snorted, too cross to finish her words. Imagination sufficed. The details elicited further wrath.

“Bread sauce! Give over, I’m not doing that. You’ll get gravy, and that’s it.

Smearing lemon butter on the skin? No way!” I retreated, having foolishly recalled the “under-done bird” event of at least 40 years ago when Mrs R served up a turkey (or was it a duck?) not quite ready.

It is definitely unwise to remind cooks of their past, er, indiscretions, especially when you are guilty of much greater oven crimes yourself.

I was the chef who burned 20 chickens in the galley of Woolworth’s, Leeds, while working there as a Saturday boy.

True, I was only 16, and I didn’t know the inside of an oven from the innards of a cow (and still don’t), so it was foolish of the assistant manager, Mr Godbold, to give me the task.

I omitted to take out the plastic giblet bags inside the birds. I didn’t know they were there. They weren’t in the elderly hens my mother plucked and drew in the scullery every Christmas.

My culinary skills improved when I boiled a stolen goose in the kids’ galvanised nappy bucket on the gas stove during my student days in Nottingham.

But that was the high point of my Christmas dinner-making. Mrs R’s festive kitchen is no place for a husband, particularly one with the cheek to offer advice on how to cook a turkey.