Dan Snow's History Hit - A History of Christmas Food

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Porpoises, beaver tails, boar's head and puffins are just some of the exquisite dishes on medieval tables during the festive season. In this episode, food historian Annie Gray joins Dan in his kitchen to cook up some delicious Christmas fare from ages past. They make wassail - an ancient alcoholic punch - and mince meat pies as they talk about the Pagan rituals, Medieval feasts and Victorian traditions that dictate what we put on our Christmas dinner tables.You can make these festive delicacies at home as you listen! Find the easy-to-follow traditional recipes Dan and Annie used here: Annie's book is called 'At Christmas We Feast'Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreDid you know you can watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Good tidings. Good tidings. History hit listeners. Now, before we go any further, I need to let you know that you can watch this episode on YouTube. It's very modern. It's very exciting. You can watch me and the food historian Annie Gray making chuda mince pies and wasail punch in my kitchen as we talk about Christmas food through the ages. And you, importantly, you can learn how to make them yourself. It is a truly festive feast for the eyes as well as it is. I've actually used these in real life. These have improved and enriched and deletionised at my family Christmases, so I hope they're useful for you. If you want to watch this, please check out the link in the show notes. Otherwise, proceed without doing anything. And you're about to listen to this classic Christmas episode from our archive. Enjoy. Hi, everyone, welcome Down Snow's History. I am standing in a kitchen next to food historian legend Annie Gray.

Hello. And today, because it's Christmas, we are. are cooking the most amazing midwinter fair. Wasail, which is a beautiful alcoholic punch and proper mince pies. Annie's going to take us through those dishes, tell us how to make them, tell us all about Christmas's past and how we ended up with the Christmas we have today. Enjoy. Annie, great to have you back on the show. Great to be back. It's Christmas, one of those things that feels eternal, but like most other traditions, just basically made up by the Victorians. Yes and no. I would say most of the modern Christmas certainly was made up by the Victorians,

with a kind of sprinkling of 1950s as well. The idea of Christmas goes back a lot further. So we look out the window here today and it's absolutely beautiful. It's a glorious, sunshiny day. It's freezing though. But the most normal thing in the British winter is pretty manky, pretty rainy, pretty miserable. If you're back in the medieval period or before then, and you're a rural farmer. It's got the additional glory of mud. Most of your cattle has been slaughtered. You can't go out in the field.

It's boring. You're poor. It's hideous. So, of course, the best thing to do it is to light a huge fire, get really drunk and eat what you can do and try and forget about your woes. And that is something that you see universally throughout northern climes. Hidious, foul winter. Look, it's really short days.

Let's get drunk and light a big fire and forget about everything. And then when the Christian church comes along and starts to adopt a lot of those early pagan, ruin, call it what you will, festivals. There you go, great Christmas, okay, fine, let's stick it there. It's fine. We want a big celebration. So all these things come together and you end up with something, call it what you will for a lot of cultures in the middle of winter, which is an excuse to get drunk and eat lots of food. So from a point of view of getting drunk, eating lots of food and that idea of coziness and something to get forward to goes back a long way. From the point of view of turkey Christmas trees, buying loads of presents for people,

decorating things and being really stressed out. That's mainly Victorian. And as I learned the podcast the other day, many things that we associate with Christmas foods, all actually from the Americas, things like turkey and potatoes. So it must have been post-Christopher Columbus anyway. Well, yeah. I mean, the idea of lots of food, that's the kind of pre-Columbian Christmas, if you like. But I mean, even say things like turkey, potatoes not really associated really hard with Christmas until quite late on anyway. I mean, Turkey comes in in 1520s, 1530s, We start to see breeding pairs come in. We start to see farms for turkeys in France in the 1530s.

They're mentioned in sumptuary laws later on. So Turkey was there. Turkey was associated with Christmas, but it was associated with Christmas because it was big, impressive and in season in the winter. It wasn't just Christmas. It was a festive, a winter seasonal dish. It wasn't the thing you ate on Christmas Day universally, really until the 1960s. And I think today is, well, we tend to forget that birds like that poultry is seasonal. So goose, capon, even chicken and turkey as well, and swan, which was another, not popular feast bird,

but certainly a feast bird that was present. I am not a big fan of swan. Have you tried swan? I had it in a pie once, but there was a little swan in the pie. Did you have to get the Queen's permission to do that? No. Apparently swans crash land on roads, thinking their rivers sometimes. And as long as you take them along to vet and the RSPB is able to check the tag on the leg, sometimes some people are then able to take them home. And what other 12 days of Christmas?

And are they important food-wise? They were very important for the medieval period and for those that were wealthy enough to afford to eat well throughout the whole period. So your traditional 12 days running from the 25th or the evening of the 24th, depending on who you speak to, through to the Epiphany, so the 5th or the 6th, depending on who you speak to. Generally in the UK, it's the 6th. And that was the period of Christmas.

So the idea was that Advent was a period of. fast. This is the point where we were obviously Catholic still pre-Reformation. So as with all fasting, if you were poor, you'd be eating stockfish, which you would repeatedly hit with a hammer for days and days and soak and then hate it and it would be maggoty and awful and you force yourself to eat it because you're not allowed to eat anything that comes from an animal. And if you're wealthy, you're going to feast on porpoise and seal and beavers' tails because they're seafood, apparently, puff in, things like that. And you're not really going to suffer any shortages. you're going to be absolutely fine.

And then once you get to Christmas itself, the fasting period is over. Way, meat feast. So you've got 12 days of feasting. And that was the idea that you had your fast, now you feasted. And once you got to the sixth, you went back to your normal rhythm

where about half the year really were fish days and the other half were meat days. So gargantuan amounts of feasting if you're wealthy enough to afford it. Right. What do you want to do you to first boss? Well, I think we should start with a drink. It is Christmas.

So we're going to make some wazale. What's that? Well, it's a lot of things to a lot of different people, including the good folks of Walthamstow, who I'm told go around today in a modern fashion with plastic bowls asking for booze. Really? Yes. And to some people, it is about fertility and orchards. And to other people, it's about mulling beer. And whoever you ask will come up with a different definition. But they'll all agree, it's very old. Okay. So some people, it's just to get a big bowl and people just pour whatever they have got in it. Yeah. I mean, it was one of those things that comes from the medieval era where it was, well, even before, that actually there was an Anglo-Saxon drink and drink response so you would shout

drink hail and everyone would go was ale and lots and lots of reenactors today love doing that with their big tankards how do you want to start what do we're going to cook a 19th century recipe because there aren't very many recipes for wasale and this one is from the 1890s we're starting with some apples so i think we'll do half the recipe so if you can just core without breaking the skin do we have a special cora or am i just using a knife you're going to He's a knife. Okay. I would have got you a piece of reindeer bone so that you could go straight through,

but I didn't have it. A lot of was-ail recipes in heavily inverted commas involve brandy, port, beer. Anything that comes to hand. And a lot of the modern ones, anyway, are hot, and this one is a hot wassale. And they may have been hot in the past. They may have involved beer. They may have involved cider. They may involve anything.

Sounds quite loose to me. Yeah, it's really just a thing people drink in the autumn and in the winter. and in the winter. So it's sort of lots of different things. There we go. History and action right now. This is it. Okay. What do you want me to have called that? So we're going to put that on this nice foil sheet here. The main thing is just that there's no pips and things that you don't want to eat in there. Okay.

How many are we doing? We're going to do three. There we go. I mean, obviously, Wazales are a celebratory thing, so ideally we should probably do about 10 and make it to feed 30 people, but... A whole of team history here. We'll just have it ourselves. Yeah, exactly.

There we go. I've made a bit of balls up at this. Yeah, well, it's all going to end up being cooked anyway, so let's not worry to work about it. It's because you can't start. It's true. No one can see it. By the way, everyone listening to this,

it's absolutely brilliant what I'm doing. If you go to Somerset today, you'll find that Worsail is built. I've just broken the wooden spoon. I was given that wooden spoon by my team of history hit for having the worst performing social media post in the whole of the year. Well, I suppose now you've got the worst

performing wooden spoon ever. There you go. Right, beautifully called. We're going to put a little bit of butter into the middle of each of these. Why not? I've got an oven that's pre-215, is that right? Baking tray. Yeah, hang on, there's some sugar here.

Sugar, there's some sugar here. Or brown, we've got brown or white. Well, it's fine. Brown's probably slightly better flow. Let's put a bit of sugar in. God, not messing about. We haven't even had the alcohol yet. Cheapers, creepers. Right, stick those on the oven and we'll roast them until they go all soft and squidgy and no the water. Okay.

Or you could drop them. I'll just drop them in the oven. Yeah, obviously. Your oven was really clean till I arrived. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, what are we plunging into next? Next, we're going to make the alcoholic liquid that we will eventually pour onto our apples, which in this case very very late Victorian you know the wine of choice for your late Victorian dude would be a nice German hock really yeah all this French wine it's all new it's good quite like it but really what we want is a German hock the kind of well it's basically blue nun and you can use blue nun for this recipe you can still get it um so we've got a bottle

of hock here and we're going to put that in our pan So I've never heard of hock. It's a soft and fruity Deutsche Landwine, Rhein. So it's on the River Rhine, honestly. Yeah, it's not similar to a Riesling or a sort of sylvana, those kind of things that we would go, oh, Alsatian one, we like those. Hock is just a little bit further along.

Queen Victoria had a vineyard in the area named after her. It's really, really popular as a wine for the Victorians. And it still is slightly less alcoholic than some wines as well, because it's northern. So, yeah, that one's 9%. So it's not going to kill us. So where do you want this? I would like that in that pan, please, along with 150 millimetres of water.

All the whole thing? Yeah. We then want cloves, ginger, maced cinnamon and cardamom so lots of spice. Okay, clothes, cinnamon. Yeah. About half, what's there, some of that. Very scientific. You're just throwing it all in.

You know, the Victorians did. measure things quite a lot but of course if you knew what you were doing you didn't need to. I guess the spirit of Orsale is it's quite loose and it's quite relaxed. As I say, there really aren't only written recipes before about the 18th century and even when they are written down, they vary. Yeah and spices vary. Some people spices are really really strong. Some people's spices have sent six months on a ship getting across from the India's. I always think just use a bit more if you're not in sure that will do. Okay, that looks really disgusting. It's a sort of light brown

now it's got various bits of spice floating in it, lots of particles. There's a kind of scum forming on top of it. It's good. It's Christmas. By the time you've drunk it, you won't care anymore. So chuck that on the heat. There we go. I'm just going to add a bit more sugar.

Not all of this. A bit more sugar. Not going to add it all. That is like a basin of sugar. My goodness. Sugar had really come down in price by the 1890s and you could get beat sugar and the tax was gone. This is all about joy and being hyperactive. Wow.

Brush your teeth, kids. So what we're going to do now, once this gets to boiling point, is we're effectively going to make a custard. A lot of sauces in the past were thickened with egg yolks. It makes them very velvety and very lovely, and I mean, cornflower is easier. But egg yolks are, I think, a nicer texture. If I give this...

And you want me to heat that up? Not yet. No, otherwise we'll get scrambled eggs. A good point. So the kind of browny liquid is going a little bit thicker and a bit of more yellow. when you add it to the egg yolk. Yeah, so what we're going to end up with is a pale fawn liquid.

I'm going to add a bit of heat to this in a minute and just thicken it up slightly. And then once that is a nice thin custard, we're going to remove our apples from the oven, put them in the bottom of the big bowl, and then this gets poured on top. And the idea is that everybody who's drinking your was ale gets an apple and some of your thin alcoholic custard, which means that you're getting protein from the egg and you're getting spices, which are obviously very good for you, alcohol to kill off anything that's nasty and make you feel fuzzy and delightful.

And the apple, which is obviously one of your five a day. So this is essentially Victorian health food. All right, let's have the apples. Whoa. Hot in this ear, Roman, isn't it? Come on, come on. Begin to regret this Christmas jumper. That's hot.

Yikes. There goes the good stuff. the liquid flowing down, submerging the apples. Here we go. So apples are now floating. Think of the most wonderful Dickensian scene you can imagine. Apples floating in a great dish with lovely warm liquid giving off an aroma. So I think we need some of this each.

Oh, thank you. So there's some squidgy apple and some liquid spiced egg-e-hawk. The smell's gone from student, throw everything that's in the house into a plastic tub booze to like really quite sophisticated smell. I never doubted you obviously. What do we shout when we drink this? Drink ale! Drink ale!

Cheers! It's Christmas in a cup! Feel ready to go! Tell me that drinking this for breakfast Christmas Day... I'll tell you what. Basically a boiled egg, isn't it? As you say, very wholesome. You're listening to Dan Snow's history yet.

There's more to come. Right, what are we going to eat with our delicious wassail? Well, I think we've got to go for mince pies, haven't we? The ultimate, the ultimate Christmassy snack. One of the actual most venerable foods of Christmas. Yes, it does go back a long way. So mince meat, mince pies, Christmas pies, as they were often known, although Christmas pies also meant something else, late medieval, Tudor, etc. Was there meat in a mince pie?

Yes. Oh, right. And we're starting with it. Oh, we're actually going to do? Okay. We are making Eliza Acton's meat meat, which is from 1845. And we are going to start with the most British of meats, which is, of course, roast beef. And we want about half a pound, so.

225 grams in new money, which is probably about half of that, which you are going to mince up, please. Okay, stand by. So the original minced meats were indeed minced meat and other things. If you look at Tudor recipes, you've got about third meat in there, and then the third suet, and the other third is dried fruit. I obviously know this, but the people listening or watching who don't know what suet is. So it is the hard fat that sits around the kidneys of a mammal. You have suet, I have suet, and I have suet.

and cows have a lot of suet. So it's usually cow suet. And what happens is you chop that fat up. And because it's a hard fat, it behaves in really interesting ways. And one of the things it does is it gives a really lovely mouth feel, very velvety-field things when you eat them. Another thing is it makes very light pastry.

And another thing is that it melts very pleasingly. So it gives mincemeat that kind of beautiful texture that you associate, I suppose, with mincemeat. Who discovered that? Okay, so just mincing is like what, can you mean it? Very, very fine, guys. So we're going to chop that up nice and small. A lot of the early mince pies used beef, some use mutton.

There are versions with fish and eggs for fast days. So they were savoury. It was a savoury. It was a mixture. The demarcation that we've got today between sweet and savoury wasn't one that was used so much in the past because sugar was so expensive, certainly in the Tudor period, that it was used almost as a spice. So, of course, in the 17th century, Britain started to colonise the West Indies,

brought in slave labour, that whole awful part of our history starts and sugar started to become a bit cheaper. But at this point, so Tudor medieval mince meats, very much sugar being used as a spice. And what you see throughout the next two or three hundred years is the meat quantity slowly dwindles. So by the time you get to the 19th century, which is the mincemeat we're making, you've got very little meat left in them, just enough to give it a bit of a back note. And then by the 20th century, most mince meats are meat-free, but not vegetarian. because they still have to sit there. And while we're cooking this,

no conversation about Christmas and the history of Christmas is complete without asking about what is the reality of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans during the Republic, did they ban Christmas? No. They didn't ban Christmas.

They did legislate against what they saw as its excesses. So there is no legislation to ban mince pies, not least because mince pies were not actually associated with Christmas as so much the whole festival. festive season. What happened was that the Puritans and especially the Scottish Presbyterians felt that Christmas was a really bad thing. They did have a point. Christmas had become

associated with rioting, with football, with the working classes getting really drunk, having sex with loads of different people. I mean, just Christmas had become... Sounds rubbish. Yeah, yeah, terrible. Very commercialised as well. Too many orange sellers profiteering off the back of the demand for oranges. They felt that it was both pagan in that really it would just been adopted by the Christian church and had never really changed, but at the same time, papist. So all the bad things at once, and let's not kind of examine that too much, but they felt it was generally bad. So the trouble is it was liked a lot by the English, liked a lot as a celebration, liked a lot of the thing to get through winter, and the Scottish didn't really

celebrate it. And the Presbyterians in Scotland, the Calvinists and Scotland in particular really wanted to ban it. But Crooks Point came in 1644 when Christmas fell on a day that was supposed to be not any form of religious day. It was a normal day. So unfortunately, the English parliament was forced to join the Scottish Parliament in banning Christmas Day as a celebration. I mean, it became a real touch point and loads of pamphlets were published for and against Christmas. And it was a really, really big cause for concern. And it was almost as if all of the arguments over what was religion, what was the Puritan state, what was the state of being, what was a moral person, all of those kind of coalesced. So there's a lot of stuff written about Christmas and Christmas became a focus

beyond in some ways what it really was. Culture wars. Yeah, well, exactly. You know, Christmas was cancelled. So, no, there were incidences of some people being beaten up by soldiers. There were, diarist, Don Evelyn was one, who tried to celebrate Christmas

and ended up in the cell, it's all very, yes, there was, yes, there wasn't, but either way, we restored it in 1660, and then everyone forgot about it from 100 years, and all the form time went, oh, I don't think I like it after all, contrary as ever. Right, so that's your meaty base,

that is your meat and your mince meat, and it is minced, so it is minced meat. I've minced that meat, I'm very pleased on. It was going to be minced it well. And now we want to put in some currants and some raisins. Okay, a handful. The lot. All of it?

Well, we want about a pound. Whoa. Yeah, good old raisins. Then we want some peel, candied peel. So we're going to use the candied peel that's there. There's no point in making mince meat just for a few people, is there? So I'm going to just grate the zest of these. two lemons as well to go in.

I mean, this is just one among many dishes on the table that would have screamed wealth. So you've got all that roast meat. You've got your turkey, your swan, your peacock, whatever else is going on. You've got a whole tradition as well around pork cookery, brawn, which in the early part of history was kind of half a pig, like literally a vertical slice down the pig that had been rolled and boiled. And then, of course, the boarshead, which we sing about in the boarshead carol, which was also difficult.

A boarshead being a pig's head. Well, Boar's Head was a boar's head until we ate all the boars. And then once we've driven the boars to extinction, if you're really wealthy or Queen Victoria, who also was very wealthy, you could get a boar brought in from Germany. But if you weren't wealthy enough to get hold of a boar, you would do it with a pig's head, which you would make look like a bore, and you would tart it up. I mean, it's a sort of two-week cook this thing. And there are recipes in Victorian cookery books for how you get your pig's head.

You have to get it cut back at the second vertebrae. You then bone it, you brine it. in red wine for two weeks turning the skin every day, you sew the skin shut, you stuff it, you put, I mean, it's amazing these things. You then swaddle it, you boil it for seven hours in more red wine, you take it out. It looks how you made it awful at that point. And then you pipe it with lard, or you put pastry across its forehead, or you put your family crest on it, you perk its ears up. I mean, it looks incredible when you finished it. But it is so much work, and it feeds a lot of people.

Normally, at least by the Edwardian period, you would get a caterer to do it. And there were rumours that people would kind of cheat and use soot to colour it and things like that. So it's one of those things where you had to have a reputable boar's head supplier, really. Typical Queen Victoria importing a German boar and boning it.

I'm literally on fire at the moment. I think the boar's head was a bit tastier than Albert Day, don't you? Oh. Okay, what's next? What's next? Lemon. So including skin? Everything. So these have been boiled. One of the really, really lovely things in the past that we just don't do a lot now is boiling entire lemons, mushing them up and making them into stuff. But you go full your recipes. Do you go to like posh houses, archives of posh houses, or where are they all kept? They're not often in the archives of posh houses because a lot of the houses, when the families gave their documents to archives, they took out all the stuff they thought wasn't interesting. Oh. So they've kept in all the things.

about Lord So-and-so buying furniture and all his hunt books and left out all the stuff about where they'd bought milk from. So it's a mixture really, lots of manuscript books. There's a lot online. The Welcome Collection has got some really, really good stuff online. And then we're going to add in a little bit of salt and some nutmeg and some ginger, all of which is in there. So let's put in some of that. Okay, folks, listening to home, I've just put a huge amount of sugar in here. I've got to be honest. You can no longer see the ingredients. there's so much sugar covering it more. Yeah.

Okay. And stop. See how exact that was? Very exact. And then we're going to put in some sherry. Sherry. And then some brandy. Get the brandy going in there.

Napoleon cognac. Right. You can use any booze for this actually. You can use, I don't know it with port, I've done it with ginger wine, I've done it with all sorts of things. So then if you give that a good old mix. Mix with my broken spoon, I'm like, oh my gosh. You see, when you mix it, you realise it's not that much sugar compared to the rest of the ingredients. Not at all.

Doesn't that look so much nicer than a modern mince, mate? There's no brown goo coming off it. I agree. I agree. This does look really delicious. The extraordinary mixture of meat, currents, sultanas, raisins. And suites. Oh, is the suet coming in?

Yeah. Okay, what's next? Next, we're going to put them into pastry cases. Let's do it. And I thought, instead of doing big ones like the Tudors or little raised pies, which would be a lot of work, we would go full on Victorian and use puff pastry. So in the miracle that is the modern world. It comes pretty right.

It does provide it. What I would say is if you're buying it always, always buy the stuff that's all butter, otherwise it tastes horrible. I'll cut the pastry out. Go for it. We've got... Actually, it's my grandma. We made cookies every Christmas. A mug which should be big enough to do the sides and then the glass should be big enough to do the lids. Okay, ready. So what is it? What's going on with the Victorians? Why does it, we seem to think, so Christmas

goes into overdrive about time? There were lots of different factors, really, but what you see is around the 1840s, there's a real feeling of the idea that Christmas has kind of lost the plot. It's been dwindling. The Georgians weren't particularly into Christmas, or at least the fashionable society wasn't particularly into Christmas. They thought it was a bit of a dreary thing to kind of have to visit people, and it's winter. Fine with the meals and the feasting and all that stuff. But the rest of it, a bit sort of plebeian and excuse to get drunk.

And it started dwindling. So you see the number of bank holidays in the year dwindle. You see the 12 days dwindle down. Obviously, it's the Industrial Revolution or the first phase of it. So there's not so many people needing to sort of sit on their ass all of the whole of December because now you're working in factories. And obviously, also agrarian husbandry has moved on. So you can now keep your cattle a lot more throughout winter and things like that.

So there's this feeling in the 1840s that Christmas has lost its way. that we're going to lose it. It's going to go the way of all things. And lots and lots of people at that point are saying this is not right. Christmas should be about hospitality. There's a real sense of nostalgia. You know, today we're all about, oh, the Victorians, that's when Christmas was great. The Victorians thought it was great in the Tudor period. So they decided that actually it should be put back to what they thought of as Christmas, which was about hospitality and charity and you didn't want to like bring poor people into your house because they like to steal something, but you did want to give to charity and that kind of thing.

And I suppose today we think of Charles Dickens and Prince Albert as having single-handedly invented Christmas because those are the iconic figures that are always talked about. But it's not true. Dickens was one of many writers who talked about it. He was just one of the most popular. And Albert gets all of the glory for inventing the Christmas tree, which was a German tradition that was present in this country already in the shape of German bakeries, Queen Charlotte, who had a yew tree in 1780s at Q.

You know, let's not give any more credit to Albert that he needs and definitely give me more. credit to dickens than he deserves which is less than he probably should get but i'm not a fond of you're not i find dickens is winning disturbingly awful and dickens himself disturbingly awful to be fair so you're you're loading the mince into the pies i am should i put a lid on yeah i'm got a terrible habit of overstuffing my mince pies by the way so just place the lid like that yeah give it i'll give it there you go now is all classes because you mentioned that there's different things for different classes in terms of what's going in the mince pies this This is quite a universal recipe, really.

I mean, there's a lot of booze, a lot of spice, a lot of meat in this, and it's quite nice meat. And Eliza Acton's very much aiming at a middle class audience. She was really, I suppose, in some ways, the quote, unquote, real Mrs. Beaton. As in, everybody always thinks Mrs. Beaton was this iconic Victorian cook who wrote about what to do for the middle class housewife, but most of Beaton's recipes were plagiarized from Eliza Acton. And Eliza Acton's a really good recipe.

So this is solidly kind of middle-class gentry level. If you're working class, you would probably buy your mince pies because you wouldn't have an oven. But the aristocratic tables, I always think, have got a lot to love. And obviously they're because they're incredibly wealthy. But you would get soup and fish and loads of different meats and loads of different vegetable dishes and a huge amount of choice. And one of the things that's really interesting about Christmas's past is how varied the meals were. Bearing mind that now we are effectively told that we should all be eating turkey. and Brussels sprouts and pigs in blankets, which are really quite modern.

And there's not a lot of variety. I mean, there is variety, but it's not what we're shown in the media. You look at recipes, you look at menus, even in the 1930s, and they're suggesting beef in Yorkshire pudding or a chicken or whatever else it is. So I always think, stop being told what to eat. If we really liked turkey, wouldn't we eat it on more than just the 25th of December? Let's pop those in the other. Right, let's go.

This is the big moment. Here we go. Give it 10 minutes, 15 minutes. 10 minutes. Yeah, drink some more Wozahel and relax. Warzail! Okay, 15 minutes is up. Smells ready to mix.

We're going to look in there. Oh my goodness me. Folks, these look like little mince pie volavans. That is amazing. Sorry, cook sang. right we're going to try a pie watch that they will be really hot i can't resist that i can't stop myself and i'm just giving you the warning so that when you burn your mouth i'm not responsible oh it's really hot it's really hot oh oh that's the delicious thing i've ever eat in my life

It's not, the texture's great, isn't it? Meaty mints meat, I've got depth of flavour, texture, complexity. It's just, it's a different ballgame. You know, it's like instant coffee versus, you know, real coffee. There's a space in most people's lives for instant coffee, that when you have the real thing, yeah. Annie, you have changed my Christmas from this day forward. Like, you're like the ghosts of Christmas, past, present, the future.

you've introduced me to a sale these proper mince pies what would you bring back from Christmas's past? Food-wise, I would bring back 12th cake instead of Christmas cake because Christmas cake isn't something that a lot of people know when to eat.

They like it but they're not sure what to do with it whereas if you have it on 12th night there's a clearly defined moment to eat it you can look forward to it and it brings Christmas to a really lovely close so Christmas doesn't peter out with a whimper that goes out with a proper bang. So you would have the 12 days of Christmas

reinstated as well? I would have the 12 days of Christmas reaned and I'd bam going into their shops before about the 20th. All this Christmas trees going up on December 1st, Malarkey. What is this? The needles dropped by about the 30th. I'd also bring back a range of flavours and stop us being so obsessed with one set of dishes on Christmas day. Eat mince pies throughout the whole season and have 15 different types of mincemeat and drink was ale and have loads of different types of food on the table. And I think Christmas should be what we want it to be and not what we're.

we're told it should be. Get rid of the shoulds. Have only what we want. Thank you for coming on the show. What is your book called? Everyone can live this out in their own kitchen. It's called at Christmas we feast. And you're great. At Christmas we feast and we will thanks to you. Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History It. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure, if you want to keep it going, that is, to hit follow in your podcast player right now. You'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically. by the power of tech. You can listen anywhere you get your pods,

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