Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Christmas Foods

Episode Date: December 24, 2022

Of the many traditions associated with the Christmas season, one of the biggest is food. Foods that are often eaten only at this time of the year and seldom outside of the season.  Unlike other Christmas traditions, food can vary greatly in different places, as well as through time. Many Christmas foods eaten in the past can’t even be found today.  Learn more about Christmas food and how these traditions differ around the world and throughout history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of the many traditions associated with the Christmas season, some of the biggest have to do with food. Foods that are often eaten only at this time of year and seldom outside of the season. Unlike other Christmas traditions, food can vary greatly in different places as well as through time. Many Christmas foods eaten in the past can't even be found today. Learn more about Christmas foods and how these traditions differ around the world and throughout history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I might as well start the episode by taking a look back to see what people ate during Christmas in the past. The differences in foods had a lot to do with the fact that foods couldn't be shipped long distances. and that people also had to eat within the seasons. The traditional central dish for many Christmas dinners, especially in England, was goose.

When Ebenezer Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning, the first thing he does is send someone out to buy a Christmas goose. Goose was central for a Christmas feast for several reasons. The first is that many farms would have geese on them. Geese, unlike chickens, had to be fed throughout the winter and didn't lay eggs during this period either. However, a goose was great for scavenging on a field that had already been harvested, eating loose grain. By the time Christmas rolled around, they were at their fattest. So it was

cheaper to eat a goose for Christmas than it was to eat a chicken. Plus, it was that time of the year when goose needed to be harvested. Geese are also considered high quality, having some of the softest fat, with the lowest melting point of any regularly consumed animal fat. Today, geese are still sometimes eaten for Christmas, but they've largely been replaced by turkeys, which are larger. In the Middle Ages, another bird was often served for Christmas by the wealthy. Peacocks. Peacocks would have been brought long distances to arrive in Europe, making them both very rare and very expensive. It's largely believed that serving peacocks was mostly for show, as they weren't considered that good to eat. Another popular dish that was often the center of any wealthy

medieval Christmas celebration was Boar's Head or Hog's Head. While this may turn many modern people off, back then it was actually considered a delicacy. There were many Christmas carols that reference Boar's Head meals. At Queen Victoria's is 1899 Christmas celebration, Boar's Head was still one of the signature items on the menu. Regular people would probably have had mince pie. Mints pies are just meat pies, usually with beef as the primary ingredient. Meat pies are still pretty common in Commonwealth countries, but not so much in the United States. Christmas mince pies would often be quite large, enough to serve one or two dozen people, a far cry from the individual-sized mince pies that you can buy at some

bakeries today. When nights came back from the Crusades, they brought with them spices. These were often added to mince pies at Christmas, especially cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. These spices became a staple of Christmas cooking because they were so expensive that the average person could probably only afford to use them once a year. As Christmas was in the dead of winter, there usually wasn't fresh fruit that could be consumed. When sugar became part of the diet, it was also used to preserve fruits. One such popular treat was called a sugar plant. There are references to sugar plums in the poem the night before Christmas, and there is a dance of the sugar plum fairy in Chikovsky's Nutcracker Ballet. A sugar plum is not what you think it is. It is not a plum covered in sugar. A sugar plum was a general name for hard candy.

Sometimes there would be a nut or a piece of dried fruit at the center. Likewise, fruit cakes were a staple of Christmas, and for some people, they still are today. There are many different fruitcake recipes, and there's no one way to make them. But, what they all usually have in common is an ample amount of dried fruit, nuts, and spices, usually making it quite rich and heavy. And they're also usually soaked in alcohol, usually rum. Believe it or not, the Pope had to get involved in a fruitcake controversy in the 15th century. Pope Innocent the 8th had to explicitly approve the use of milk and butter in fruitcakes in Saxony in 1490, in a document now known as the Butter Letter. Fruitcakes in German-speaking countries are known as Stolen, which is also a Christmas food.

A popular Christmas beverage you'll find in Christmas markets all over Europe, but especially in Germany, is glu vine or mold wine. Mold wine is a wine served hot, which usually includes spices, sugar, and sometimes fruit. Mold cider is also a similar traditional drink in some regions. Up in the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, the traditional Christmas dish is Lutifisk. Lutifisk is a dried whitefish, usually cod, which is cured in lye, and then rehydrated soaking in water for several days.

When fully rehydrated, it becomes a jelly-type substance. It actually went out of fashion in Nordic countries as a Christmas meal, but has been making a comeback. And there's actually more Lutophis consumed during Christmas nowadays in Minnesota and Wisconsin than there is in the countries I just mentioned. Lutophisks very polarized opinions. People either love it or hate it, and there are probably more people in the latter camp. In Poland, the Christmas Eve meal is usually meatless. but does include fish. The Vigilia meal will include beetroof soup, parogis, pickled herring,

and many other dishes. Picked herring, by the way, is also a popular Christmas dish in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Russia. Many of the most popular Christmas foods are sweets or desserts. Perhaps there's no sweet more symbolic of Christmas than candy canes. Confectionaries in Germany in the 17th century commonly made sticks made of sugar. The earliest mention of candy canes dates back to 1670. The choir master at the clone cathedral bent the sticks to look like a shepherd's crook and gave them to children at the long Christmas service. At the time, the canes were all white. The tradition of giving these candies to children at church on Christmas spread throughout Europe.

In 1847, the first mention of candy canes appeared in the United States. They were used by a German immigrant by the name of August Imgard, who used them to decorate his Christmas tree. There's actually no evidence of striped candy canes until the 20th century. It was at some point around the beginning of the 20th century when candy makers began to add peppermint in winter green flavors and hence stripes. A confectioner by the name of Robert McCormick, who owned a company called Bob's Candies, invented a machine that would automatically bend candy canes, making him the largest producer of candy canes in the world. Another sweet Christmas tradition is gingerbread.

Gingerbread actually dates back over a thousand years. It was supposedly brought to France in 992 by an Armenian monk by the name of Gregory of 9th. Nicarbred was originally just a spiced bread, most commonly using ginger root, which is how it got its name. Gingerbread was, for centuries, traditionally a hard substance, more like a cookie. This is how it was used to make gingerbread men. The first gingerbread men were attributed to the court of Queen Elizabeth I of England, who gave them to representatives of foreign royal courts. Gingerbread is still popular all over Europe, with different countries having slightly different takes on how it's made and served. The first gingerbread houses were created in Germany

in the early 19th century, and they were actually made in response to the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, which was published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm. When Europeans took the recipe for gingerbread with them to the Americas, they switched sugar with molasses, which was cheaper, and this resulted in a softer gingerbread than what was available in Europe. The largest gingerbread house ever created was in 2013 in Bryan, Texas. A group built an edible house that was 2,520 square feet or 234 square meters in size. It was estimated to have 35.8 million calories. Assuming that a person ate the necessary 2,000 calories per day,

the world-record gingerbread house would take them 49 years to consume. Another Christmas dessert that came from France is the tradition of a eulog cake, also known in French as Bouch de Noelle. The history of the Uologue cake is pretty straightforward. Bakers tried to make a cake that looked like a Ullog. It originated in 19th century France, and a traditional type is a sponge cake which is rolled and covered in chocolate icing to look like the bark of a tree.

The Ullog is popular in France and French-speaking countries, and it has also spread to Spain, Portugal, the U.S. and the U.S. in the U.S. you'll often find Ullog cakes with ice cream in the middle. There's one other food, beverage actually that I wanted to touch on. Eggnog. Eggnog is a drink made with milk, eggs, sugar, and cream, and usually spiked with some sort of alcohol, although you can't easily drink it without alcohol. That's all well and good, but what exactly is a nog? Are there other types of gnags out there, like beef gnaug or orange gnaug? The orange of the word gnaug has been

highly disputed. No one is really sure where eggnog was developed. One theory is that it came from the word Noggin, which is a Middle English word for a wooden drinking glass. The Oxford English Dictionary says Nog was the name for a strong beer in East Anglia. Another dictionary says that eggnog was actually an American invention from the late 18th century. It might be a combination of a rum drink called Grog and a cup called a Nog. It was called an Egg and Grog, which was later to shorten to eggnog. Yet another theory says it comes from the Scottish word Nug, which was a drink heated with a hot poker. The first documented use of the word eggnog came from a clergyman from Maryland in 1775 who wrote a poem that referred to eggnog.

Regardless of where the word eggnog came from, its origins were almost certainly an English drink called Posset. Posset was made with milk and spice and alcohol was added to curdle the milk. As the drink had eggs and milk, it was something that only wealthy people tended to drink. However, milk and eggs were much more abundant in the colonies, and the drink became much more popular in America. George Washington served a drink that was very much like eggnog. His recipe had whiskey, rum, and sherry in addition to eggs, milk, sugar, and spices. A Tom and Jerry is a drink that's a variant of an eggnog with rum and brandy served hot. It was created in 1820 by a British journalist.

And the cartoon cat and mouse Tom and Jerry actually got their name from the drink. There are regional and national variants of eggnog all over the world, including Germany, Mexico, and Peru. And usually the change in ingredients involves different alcohols and spices. Most people now just buy an eggnog mix because of the cost and difficulty of making it from scratch. And I can't leave the topic of eggnog without mentioning the Great Eggnog riot of 1826. The United States Military Academy, in an attempt to cut down on drunkenness, banned alcohol from the campus. However, in 1826, the cadet smuggled in a barrel of whiskey to make eggnog for Christmas. The result was a massive, out-of-control Christmas party which resulted in a great deal

of destruction of school property. 20 cadets ended up being court-martialed with several dozen more being implicated in the affair. The entire point of the story is that there was a riot that weakened the officer core of the U.S. Army, which was due to eggnog. I have only scratched the surface of the wide variety of Christmas foods

that can be found all over the world. Almost every country which celebrates Christmas has its own unique foods, and oftentimes their traditions can differ within regions or even within families. Many of you have your own family traditions, of what you eat and drink during the holidays. No matter how you celebrate your holidays,

whether it's eating habanadas in Brazil, baccalao Navidaino in Mexico, malva pudding in South Africa, or even going out for Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan, enjoy your food and have a very merry Christmas. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett.

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