Dan Snow's History Hit - Christmas Feasts Through The Ages!

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

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'Follow the link to see the recipes featured in the podcast and learn more about Christmases past.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everyone, welcome to 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 cooking the most amazing mid-winter fare, wassail, 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' past and how we ended up with the christmas we have today enjoy t-minus 10 the thomas bomb dropped on hiroshima god saved the king no black white unity till there is first and black unity

never to go to war with one another again and lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower annie great great to have you back on the show great to be back it's christmas one of those Liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Annie Gray, great to have you back on the show. Great to be back. Is 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 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. Hideous, 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, Druid, call it what you will festivals, they 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 look 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 in the podcast the other day, many of the things that we associate with Christmas foods, all actually from the Americas, things like turkey and potatoes. So it must have been post-Christmas for 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 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 as well, we tend to forget that birds like that poultry are 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 no 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 they're 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 days and soak and then hate it. And it would be maggoty and awful. And you'd 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 beaver's tails because they're seafood, apparently. Puffin, 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. Wahey! Meat feast. So you've got 12 days of feasting. And that was the idea, that you'd 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 were wealthy enough to afford it.

Right. What do you want me to do first, boss i think we should start with a drink the drink yeah okay so we're going to make some wassail 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, 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 get a big bowl and people just pour whatever they have got in it.

Yeah, I mean, wassail is one of those things that comes from the medieval era where it was, even before that actually, there was an Anglo-Saxon drink and drink response. So you would shout, drink ale! And everyone would go, was ale! And lots and lots of reenactors today love doing that with their big tankards.

How do you want me to start? We're going to cook a 19th century recipe because there aren't very many recipes for was ale. 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 corer or am I just using a knife? You're going to use 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 wassail 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 wassail. in heavily inverted commas, involve brandy, port, beer, whatever it is. Anything that comes to hand. And a lot of the modern ones, anyway, are hot. And this one is a hot wassail. And they may have been hot in the past. They may have involved beer.

They may have involved cider. They may have involved anything. Sounds quite loose to me. Yeah, it's really just a thing people drink in the autumn and in the winter. So it's sort of lots of different things. There we go. History in action right now. History in action, this is it.

Okay, what do you want me to have called that? So we're gonna put that on this nice foil sheet here. The main thing is just that there's no pips and things that you don't wanna eat in there. Okay. Much subtle. How many are we doing? We're gonna do three.

Okay, here we go. I mean, obviously was-ales are a celebratory thing. So ideally we should probably do about 10 and make it to feed 30 people but uh whole of team history here we'll just have it ourselves yeah exactly there we go so um i've made a bit of a balls up yeah well it's all gonna end up being cooked anyway so let's not worry too much about it it's kind of stuff that's true no one can see it by the way everyone listening to this it's absolutely brilliant what i'm doing that was a hit if you go to somerset today you'll find that wasale is just broken the

wooden spoon i was given that wooden spoon by my team at history for having the worst performing social media post in the whole of the year well i suppose now you've got 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 poured. Excellent. Right, 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, and there's some sugar here. There's some sugar here. Or brown, do we got brown or white? Brown is fine. Brown's probably slightly better flavor. Let's put a bit of sugar into each of them. God, not messing about, we haven't even added the alcohol yet. Jeepers creepers.

Right, stick those in the oven and we'll roast them until they go all soft and squidgy and no more water. Or you could drop them. I'll just drop them in the oven. Yeah, obviously. Your oven could drop them. I'll just drop them in the oven. Your oven was really clean till I arrived. 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. Okay. 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 if you can still get it. 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 Landwein, Rhein, so it's on the river Rhine I see. Yeah it's not dissimilar to a Riesling or a sort of Silvana, those kind of things that we would go oh Alsatian wine, we like those. Hock is just a little bit further along. Queen Victoria had a vineyard in the area named after her. Really?

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 millilitres of water.

All whole thing? Yeah. We then want cloves, ginger, mace, cinnamon and cardamom. So lots of spice. Okay, cloves, 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 our sale is it's quite loose and it's quite relaxed. As I say, there really aren't any written recipes before about the 18th century. And even when they are written down... They vary.

Yeah, and spices vary. Some people's spices are really, really strong. Some people's spices have spent six months on a ship getting across from the Indians. I always think just use a bit more if you're not insure. 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 sugar had really come down in price

by the 1890s and you could get beet 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 you know I mean corn flour is easier but egg yolks are I think a nicer texture. If I give this... Do 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 little 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 a big bowl, and then this gets poured on top.

And the idea is that everybody who's drinking your wassail 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 here oven, isn't it?

Yes. Pop, pop. Ooh, come on, come on. Hot in his ear, isn't it? It is. Come on, come on! I'm beginning 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. How perfect is that? 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 eggy hog. Liquid spiced eggy hock.

The smell's gone from student throw everything that's in the house into a plastic tub booze to like really quite sophisticated smell. Yeah. I never doubted you, obviously. What do we shout when we drink this? Drink ale. Drink ale. Cheers. It's Christmas in a cup.

I feel ready to go. Tell me that drinking this for breakfast, Christmas Day... Oh, I'll tell you what. ...is basically a boiled egg, isn't it? As you say, very wholesome. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. More after this. Why were medieval priests so worried

that women were going to seduce men with fish that they'd kept in their pants? Who was the first gay activist? And what on earth does the expression sneezing in the cabbage mean? I'll tell you, it's not a cookery technique, that's for sure. Join me, Kate Lister, on Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. the history of sex scandal in society a podcast where we will be bed hopping throughout time and civilization to bring you the quirkiest and kinkiest stories from history as promised there will be sex and has said that henry is not skillful in copulating with a woman and has neither vigor nor potency and scandal everybody just descends onto this crime scene and it's being pulled apart

by members of the public sort of as quickly as they can excavate the bodies. And moments which shaped society. Pointy boobs then became a thing and were still a thing into the 1950s. What more could you possibly want? Listen to Betwixt the Sheets today wherever it is that you get your podcasts. A podcast by History Hit. wherever it is that you get your podcasts. A podcast by History Hit.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Christmasy snack.

One of the actual most venerable foods of Christmas. Yes, it does go back a long way. So mincemeat, 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 meat. We are making Eliza Acton's mincemeat 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 mincemeats were indeed minced meat and other things if you look at Tudor recipes, you've got about a third meat in there and then a third suet and the other third is dried fruit. I obviously know this, but there might be people listening or watching

who don't know what suet is. Suet is the hard fat that sits around the kidneys of a mammal. You have suet, 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 mouthfeel, very velvety feel to 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, cubing it? Very very fine dice. So we're going to chop that up nice and small. A lot of the early mince pies used beef, some used mutton, there are versions with fish and eggs for fast days. So they were savoury, it was a savoury dish? It was a mixture, the demarcation that

we've got today between sweet and savory 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 colonize the West Indies brought in slave labor that whole awful part of our history starts and sugar started to become a bit cheaper but at this point so Tudor medieval mincemeats 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 mincemeats are meat-free but not vegetarian because they still have zeritin 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 quamrel 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 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 had 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 as a thing to get through winter. And the Scottish didn't really celebrate it. And the Presbyterians in Scotland, the Calvinists in Scotland in particular really wanted to ban it. The crook's 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. Christmas was cancelled. So no, there were incidences of some people being beaten up by soldiers. There were diarists, Don Evelyn was one who tried to celebrate Christmas and ended up in the cells. 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 for 100 years and all the bombed tom 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 we've minced it well uh and now we want to put in some currants and some raisins okay a handful of the lot all of it Well we want about a pound. Whoa. That's probably minimum. 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 mincemeat 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 boar's head which we sing about in the boar's head carol which was also difficult boar's head being a pig's head well boar's head was a boar's head until we ate all the boars and then once we'd 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 boar. 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 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 I 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's incredible when you 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 have 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 though, don't you? Okay, 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, making them into stuff. But you go for 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 bought milk from. So it's a mixture, really. Lots of manuscript books. There's a lot online. The Wellcome 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. Okay. All of which is in there. let's put in ready some of that okay folks listening at home i've just put a huge amount of sugar in here i gotta 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 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've done 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 oh my gosh see when you mix it you realize it's not that much sugar no not at all not at all doesn't that look so much nicer than a modern mincemeat there's no brown goo coming off it i agree i agree this does look really delicious the extraordinary mixture of meat currantsrants, sultanas, raisins. And suets. And apples. Oh, is the suet coming in? Yeah.

Okay, what's next? Next, we're gonna 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 provided 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 it's my grandma we made cookies every christmas mug which should be big enough to do the sides and then the glass 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 is it we seem to think so Christmas goes into overdrive at that 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 in winter. And fine with the meals and the feasting and all that stuff, but the rest of it, ugh, a bit sort of plebeian and an 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 arse 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 and 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 and 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 they might 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 you know U-tree in the 1780s at Kew you know know. Let's not give any more credit to Albert than he needs and definitely give no more credit to Dickens than he deserves,

which is less than he probably should get. But I'm not a fond of Dickens. Are you not? I find Dickens' winning disturbingly awful and Dickens himself disturbingly awful, to be fair. So you're loading the mince into the pies. I am. Should I put a lid on?

Yeah, I've got a terrible habit of over stuffing my mince pies by the way. So just place the lid like that? Yeah, give it a little sip. There you go. Now this 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 is quite a universal middle class 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. 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 I've got a lot to love and obviously they have 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 is past is how varied the meals were. Bearing in 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 and

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 oven. Right, let's go. This is the big moment. Here we go. Give it 10 minutes, 15 minutes? 10 minutes. Yeah, drink some more wassail and relax. Wassail! Okay, 15 minutes is up. Smells ready to make.

We're gonna look in there. Oh my goodness me Folks these look like little mince pie vol-au-vaux That is amazing Sorry, right. We're gonna try a pie. What's that? They will be really hot. I can't resist that. I can't stop myself I'm just giving you the warning. Okay, when you burn your mouth, I'm not responsible. Oh! It's really hot. It's really hot, though. Oh. That is the most delicious thing I've ever eaten in my life. The texture's great, isn't it?

Mmm. Meaty mincemeat has got depth of flavour, texture, complexity. It's a different ball game. It's like instant coffee versus real coffee. There's a space in most people's lives for instant coffee, but when you have the real thing, yeah. Andy, you have changed my Christmas from this day forward. You're like the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. You've introduced me to a sale of these proper mince pies. What would you bring back from Christmas's past?

Food-wise, I would bring back Twelfth 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 Twelfth Night, it'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, but goes out with a proper bang.

So you would have the 12 days of Christmas reinstated? I would have the 12 days of Christmas reinstated and I'd bang going into the shops before about the 20th. All these Christmas trees going up on December the 1st. Malarkey. What is this? The needles drop by about the 30th. going up on December the 1st. Malarkey. What is this? The needles drop by about the 13th.

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 wassail 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 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 so everyone can live this out in their own kitchen? It's called At Christmas We Feast. And you're right, At Christmas We Feast and we will thanks to you. you