Taste: My Life through Food(24)

In England serving fish on Christmas Eve is not a tradition, but I still try to make at least two or three fish dishes when that night rolls around. I find them necessary light precursors to the very meat-heavy Christmas and Boxing Day meals that are soon to come.

The Christmases that I have shared with my in-laws here in England are like so many I have experienced all my life. The day is filled with gift giving, wine pouring, game playing, and, new to me, Christmas-cracker pulling. It is, however, the food that differs most from my family’s Christmas Day fare, but luckily it is equally delicious, my mother-in-law Joanna being an excellent cook. There are hors d’oeuvres like “devils on horseback” (dates wrapped in bacon and broiled to a light crisp) and tiny sausages, both of which disappear down our throats within minutes on little rivers of champagne. Unlike in an Italian meal, there is no first course (please see next chapter regarding this), but the food is bountiful: British-style roasted potatoes, steamed vegetables, and a bowl of mush called bread sauce. (Bread sauce is very white bread soaked in milk, which looks and tastes like something Mr. Bumble and his ilk would have given to workhouse boys or toothless Victorian pensioners. I love everything else but it’s just… not my favorite.)

All of these accompany a main course, which is always a grand piece of meat. Years ago it would have often been a turkey, but since my arrival into the family and the introduction of an American Thanksgiving into the calendar, we have all decided that two turkeys in a month is a bit redundant on the palate. Therefore the roast beast taking center stage is either a three-bird roast (in America it’s called a turducken, or a gooducken), which consists of either a deboned chicken stuffed inside a deboned duck, stuffed inside a deboned turkey or goose, respectively; a baked ham; a standing rib of beef; or a big fat goose all on its own. I love them all, as does everyone at the table, hence very little is left at the end of the meal. New and very welcome to my taste buds on my first British Yuletide was the classic English Christmas Day dessert sticky toffee pudding. I’m not one for sweets, but for some reason I find this very hard to resist, especially with a glass of good port that my father-in-law generously serves at the end of the meal.

After this feast we are all well sated, and as I listen to the British accents of my family, I wonder what Christmas would have been like here in days of old. I imagine donning my frock coat and top hat, wrapping my long woolen scarf around my neck, bidding farewell to my in-laws, and strolling home with my family through snowy streets lined with Georgian homes, the smoke of the coal fires within wafting from their chimneys as we make our way to the Cratchit house to check just once more on dear sweet Tiny Tim.

However, my Hollywood version of Jolly Old England is decimated when I open the front door of my in-laws’ home and see it is not snowing but raining again, or still. The children are crying because they are leaving their grandparents, apparently forever in their minds, and we make our way into the driveway, wrestle them into their car seats as the older kids somehow squeeze into any empty space available, and cautiously drive the one mile back home before two-year-old Emilia’s chronic carsickness causes her to vomit all over herself. Talk about Dickensian.





Christmas Day


Christmas mornings with three small children—as anyone will know who has three small children—are at once heartwarming and exhausting. Upon far too early an awakening, Kate and I would have to stop the kids from going after their gifts like velociraptors attacking their prey. I always kept large plastic bags at the ready and would fill them with the shredded wrapping paper as soon as it was rent from the presents by their desperate little hands. (This is to ensure that tidiness is maintained and that no present gets lost or discarded accidentally under what will soon be mounds of paper. I once threw away a beautiful antique pencil drawing I had bought for Kate as a gift, and since then I diligently employ the “unwrap—grab the wrap—bag the wrap” method. Not a single piece of artwork or tin toy soldier has been lost since.)

After all the hubbub and the thrill of gift giving had ended and some adult relative who had come to stay was assembling a toy that I refused to assemble because I can’t bear to read instructions, it was always our intention to loll around for a while in our pajamas, sip coffee, and watch the children short-circuit as they bounced from one toy to another. Every year we imagined that these rare moments of repose were a possibility, as guests would not arrive for Christmas dinner until midafternoon. But every year this never happened. Here is the reason why.



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There is a dish, a very special dish, that is served in our home on Christmas Day. It is called timpano. This is a baked drum of pastrylike dough filled with pasta, ragù, salami, various cheeses, hard-boiled eggs, and meatballs. It’s a big, heavy dish, and needless to say very filling. The recipe and the tradition of serving it on special occasions, particularly Christmas, were brought to America by my father’s family. I never remember not having it on Christmas Day, whether we were celebrating at our home or at the home of one of my dad’s siblings. It is quite a showstopper, so much so that we chose to feature it in Big Night as the centerpiece of the film’s climactic meal. However, its preparation is very labor-intensive, and the cooking process requires much time and attention. It is for this last reason that, even though we would not be sitting down to eat until about two or three p.m., my parents would arrive at about eleven a.m. to begin the process of finishing the cooking of the timpano, which they had painstakingly assembled a couple of days before.