The four things you need if you are cooking lunch on Christmas Day
(and not one of them is a recipe)
Around now, as we race towards half-term, families all over the country are starting to make plans for Christmas. Some prefer to flee the country to escape the madness; others like to keep it low-key, with a favourite ready-meal and a good film. But plenty of us embrace the season and the chance to get together with family and friends on one of the nation’s few remaining collective feast days to share a good meal.
If this is the first time you’ve offered to host Christmas – well done! Gathering people together, and feeding them well, despite all the insecurities and unrealistic expectations they may bring to your table, is a noble and generous thing to do. But be warned – the feelings of benevolence and quiet excitement will soon dissipate when you realise what you’ve taken on.
You will notice that you are drawn magnetically to any periodical featuring Christmas recipes (on sale in a newsagent near you very soon) and will find yourself tearing through your house trying to muster all the Delia books you own. But recipes will only get you so far. The real challenge of the day is not how to tart up your sprouts, but how to stay jolly when it feels like Armageddon has arrived and is kicking off in your kitchen.
Even if you are ‘keeping things simple this year’, if you happen to be catering for more than two, and if you want to serve at least one sauce and one veg with your roast meat, plus a pud, and maybe a starter, even a simple one, and if you would like to eat off china rather than paper, you will see that there is still a volume of work required to coordinate the graceful movement of food from oven to table to bin, and serveware from cupboard to table to dishwasher and back to cupboard. This dance doesn’t happen in a restaurant kitchen, but in a real home, where, without careful orchestration, you will find yourself prone to snapping when you are carrying two trays of scalding hot oil and realise there are no clear surfaces to put them on, or when the rings on the hob are all used up and you’ve still got the bread sauce to make, or when all the serving spoons have mysteriously disappeared, or when you can’t remember where the gravy boat is, or when the potatoes are done way before the turkey, or when you’re facing a mountain of greasy washing up feeling so weary from the late nights and early mornings that you could weep.
This is how you prevent your guests feeling uncomfortable and yourself collapsing with exhaustion:
Make sure that you prepare as much as possible in advance. By Christmas Day, most of the grafting and crafting should be done: stale loaves transformed into soft, white crumbs; brassicas softened; flabby skin crisped; the bland amalgamated with the flavoursome. The veg should be peeled, the silver polished, drinks lined up, linen ironed. So that on the big day the job is not transforming ingredients but getting them from A to B
Get your equipment ready. With the precision of an officer in the royal logistics corp, you need to think through your inputs and outputs and dig out in advance all the kit you need. There must be enough oven shelves in the oven and space on the hob for everything; trivets to protect kitchen surfaces from trays of hot food; dishes and jugs and platters ready to receive the fruits of your labour.
Assign helpers. It takes the pressure off everyone if you can have tasks at the ready for people who offer to help, as most guests will. And if they don’t, assign them jobs anyway. I find it works well to have two helpers stationed at a sink of hot bubbly water in the final ten minutes before everyone takes their seats: one to wash; one to dry and put away. That way all the bulky items which the food has been cooked in can be dealt with, leaving the dishwasher clear for plates and glasses. It’s also good to have someone who is primed and ready to scrape plates and load dishwasher after every course and someone to keep drinks topped up. If you need to pay children to do these jobs, do so.
Make a plan. Working back from the time you want to serve the meal, allow enough time for each item to be cooked, prepared and decanted into serving dishes. Specify clearly times food needs to go in and out of the oven, and on and off the hobs. This will save you huge amounts of mental energy on the day, and will free up your brain for other things, like drinking sherry and enjoying your guests.
If all this is starting to hurt your head, fear not! There are still places available for my Christmas Lunch cookery class, on 23rd November. I’ll provide you with a comprehensive time plan, as well as all the shopping lists and to-do lists you need to keep you sane in the run up to the big day. And I’ll demonstrate everything from starter through to pud. Click here for more details.