Christmas dinner? At home or in a restaurant? It’s at this juncture of the year, with Christmas dinner hurtling towards us, that you may well find yourself muttering: “Well, we could always go out!” Who could blame any home cook for wanting to shove this great burden on to someone else’s back, especially since every culinary TV show, magazine article and advertising break since mid-November has hammered home what a colossal faff Christmas dinner actually is. No, it’s not just a slightly posh Sunday roast with a few more guests.
Christmas dinner in the UK these days is more like a cross between dinner at Balmoral and 4 July at Mar-a-Lago. The table has to be heaving with holly-embossed crockery, the carrots must be bejewelled in star anise and Himalayan pink pepper, the turkey has to be brined in aromatic salt water and your roasties shaken in polenta and smothered in duck fat. If you’re the designated martyr organising proceedings, field-marshalling everything and cooking this tinsel-strewn palaver, it is common to try instead to divert it all to the local pub, where they’re doing “turkey and all the trimmings” for £79 a head (and including a cracker and a pre-dinner “glass of something sparkly”).
After several attempts at spending Christmas “out”, however, I’m still on the fence as to whether or not it’s really worth it. Chances are, if you’re the designated cook, as I often am, you’ll also find yourself equally burdened as the designated table-finder, taxi-booker and exasperated berk trying to get Aunt Agnes up to the Queen’s Head by 3pm, mainly because she won’t on any account miss the king’s speech, won’t eat turkey without bread sauce and would ideally like her Jim Reeves cassette played over the pub’s sound system.
