The greatest Christmas tradition of all? The leftovers

It begins, as it does each year, with a stern telling-off from my butcher for failing to order the turkey until it is almost too late. He consults his Turkey Book for an ominously long time, then announces that all the small turkeys are already spoken for. Chastened, I settle for a monstrous fowl that will find us eating up the leftovers until well into the New Year.

Everyone moans about Christmas food: no one, it seems, has a good word to say for turkey (dry), Christmas pudding (heavy), let alone the penitential Brussels sprout. The newspapers are full of inventive alternatives – beetroot Wellington, assorted gold-flecked chocolate messes, exotic ways with brassicas. Some of these, presumably, will establish themselves as beloved traditions, for while Christmas memories spring from a multi-sensorial overload, it is taste, the most primitive of the senses, that drives a nostalgia that often has little to do with actual enjoyment.

Two decades ago, when my small son firmly resisted a traditional Christmas lunch, we developed a new tradition: he ate sausages and chocolate coins, I ate partridge and the port jelly from Elizabeth Jane Howard and Fay Maschler’s Cooking for Occasions. Aside from the odd part-gnawed chocolate florin, there were no leftovers. But times change, families reconfigure, and suddenly we find ourselves involved in a new set of festive traditions: Buck’s fizz with the presents, Turkish Delight on the sideboard, and cheese. Endless cheese, long after anyone has the appetite for it.

Apart from the dolls’ house lunches of my son’s childhood, my favourite Christmas meals have always been the leftovers: a laid-back Boxing Day hunt supper of cold cuts and bubble and squeak, a tangerine and a violet cream with a late-night film in the peaceful interregnum between Christmas and New Year. But while debate simmers on the Telegraph’s letters pages over the best way to cook bubble and squeak, a brace of polls reveals that when it comes to leftover cheese, we seem singularly clueless.

A survey by London’s assiduously artisanal Borough Market estimates that 2.2 million kilos of Christmas cheese ends up in the bin. Meanwhile, a Yougov poll found that most Brits have no idea what to do with three sides of an old-fashioned box cheese grater. I am no stranger to fear of cheese recycling. But as long as there is no wayward seasonal inclusion of cranberry or mango, cheese is endlessly adaptable.

My favourite destination for the sad bits of hard cheese left over after Christmas used to be Susan Campbell’s forthright recipe for cheese souffle in her great culinary primer Poor Cook. These days I lean towards Mira Sodha’s Eggs Kejriwal – the most comforting combination of eggs and cheese ever devised.

But the main point is that one buys food at Christmas as a signifier for love. Vast turkeys, unfeasible quantities of cheese – nothing wrong with that, as long as you know what to do with them, once their initial, Instagrammable glamour has passed. Souffles, risottos, fricasees – none of them are quite as good-looking as the theatrical main event. But the sweetest memories are not necessarily the most photogenic. Sometimes, wrangling the ingredients you’ve got into a nourishing, post-celebratory dish can turn out to be the best Christmas tradition of all.