An English dinner for a Christmas anywhere

Idon’t have a drop of English blood in me, but when I think about Christmas dinner, my imagination heads directly to England. For some reason, it’s always Victorian England I picture. Christmas to me is horsedrawn carriages in the snow, gas lights flickering merrily, rosy-cheeked children on wooden sleds, men in top hats and women in silk dresses over crinoline with a bustle in the back.

They gather around the fire nibbling on hot chestnuts and discussing Dickens’ delightful new novel while (or whilst) waiting for dinner to be served.

And when dinner comes it is sumptuous: a fragrant, perfectly roasted joint of beef, golden Yorkshire pudding, beautiful root vegetables — it being too cold to grow anything green — and a suitably English dessert, such as trifle.

Only I don’t like trifle.

So I decided to make a traditional English

Yuletide dinner with an equally traditional but non-trifle Yuletide dessert, mincemeat pie.

Don’t freak out. Mincemeat pie is made by stewing together a large variety of dried and fresh fruit, flavored with holiday spices and, if you like, a hit of alcohol to encourage the flavors to blend.

At least, that is what I always thought. But I don’t have a drop of English blood in me, as I believe I have mentioned, and I did not know

that mincemeat originally did have minced beef or venison in it, and is still often made with beef suet. And yes, it is served for dessert. I decided to go with the all-fruit version.

But dessert comes last. I began instead with the beef, a standing rib roast. This is what I actually make every year for Christmas Eve, at least since I have been married, because it is absolutely the best thing I know how to cook. It is also one of the very easiest.

I prefer to grill my roast — over indirect heat, please — because it is the combination of the fire and the beef that makes the dish so spectacular. If you don’t have a grill with a lid, roasting it in the oven is absolutely the next best thing.

Cookbook writers and online recipeteers always try to come up with various rubs and marinades to make a standing rib roast better. Pay them no attention. A standing rib roast is perfect as is; adding anything more than a generous amount of salt and pepper merely diminishes the epochal greatness that is a simply cooked rib roast.

Mine was outstanding, beefy and juicy with just the right hint of smoke. I made sure to cook enough for leftovers too, so there are plenty of jaw-droppingly delicious roast beef sandwiches and roast beef hash in my future.

Naturally, an English Christmas dinner featuring beef has to be — has to be — accompanied by Yorkshire pudding. It follows as night follows day, or as mash follows bangers.

Yorkshire pudding has nothing to do with what we Americans think of as pudding. “Pudding,” especially when preceded by “Yorkshire,” is one of those British words that only prove the English don’t know how to speak English.

Yorkshire pudding is popovers, a puffy and rich form of what is technically a roll but is so much more exquisite than that.

You make a batter not unlike that for pancakes, but with more eggs, and pour it into a hot muffin pan with equally hot oil (or beef drippings) in the bottom. The batter puffs up impressively as it bakes and turns a lovely golden brown.

The taste is wonderfully buttery, which is odd because it has no butter. And there is

absolutely nothing that goes better with a standing rib roast.

For my vegetable, I first thought of pease porridge, a dish so quintessentially English that it has its own nursery rhyme. You’re saying it to yourself now.

But pease porridge is just yellow split peas that are boiled and then mashed into mush, served with butter or maybe ham. Surely, your Christmas table deserves something better than that.

Instead, I made Roasted Carrots and Red Onions, a dish created by roasting carrots together with red onions. A little bit of olive oil (actually, it’s kind of a lot of olive oil) and some salt are the only other ingredients you need.

And yet, the dish is hearty and hugely satisfying. It is appropriately British, it’s a light coun

terpoint to the heavier dishes of the dinner, and it is festive enough for the holiday meal.

Dessert, you may recall, was mincemeat pie. This is a dish that really deserves to make a comeback in this country.

The mincemeat filling is subtle and multilayered, a complex whirl of flavors that blend together in perfect harmony: fresh apples, apple cider, candied cherries, brown sugar, dried apricots, dried cherries, dried cranberries, dried currants, dried figs, orange zest, orange juice, golden raisins, regular raisins and butter, spiced with allspice, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves and flavored with dark rum.

All of these ingredients are simmered together until they dissolve into a kind of unity, a whole that is very much more than a sum of all of its many parts. It becomes a distinct flavor of its own, mincemeat.

A great filling deserves a great crust. Here I returned to my favorite crust, devised by Ina Garten. It uses both butter and shortening, so you get that wonderful buttery flavor as well as a light, flaky crust. It is superb, and even better with mincemeat filling.

A Christmas dinner like this one just might help bring peace on Earth and good will to men.