How to do Christmas, and other festive feasts, like Fortnum & Mason
- The cookbook Fortnum & Mason: Christmas & Other Winter Feasts features an introduction by Tom Parker Bowles
- It is full of accessible and affordable recipes to satisfy all palates this festive season
It probably goes without saying that this winter holiday season won’t be nearly as festive as those of years past. So I was a bit wary of reviewing Fortnum & Mason: Christmas & Other Winter Feasts (2018). Would the book be filled with relentless, unaffordable luxury that seemed inappropriate in these times? Would it be of interest only to the one-percenters, who, even as the economy is tanking for the common folk, are busy fiddling while the world burns?
Thank goodness, no. The recipes, by Fortnum & Mason executive chef Sydney Aldridge, are accessible and – often – affordable.
Still, the London department store is associated with luxury and indulgence, as Tom Parker Bowles (yes, that Parker Bowles) writes in the introduction.
“Christmas at Fortnum’s. It’s the pure, 175-proof spirit of the festive season, the quintessence of Yuletide delight. ‘Is greediness a forgivable sin at Christmas time?’ gasped a smitten journalist, waxing lyrical about the store, sometime towards the start of the twentieth century. ‘It ought to be, seeing how many well-nigh irresistible temptations one is exposed to at that delectable season.’
“As a child, it was less shop, more glittering, spice-scented Xanadu, a sugar-coated stately pleasure dome. With the added advantage of being real, and sitting, ever merrily, at 181 Piccadilly. Stepping into the shop, past the tail-coated doorman, was the nearest one could get to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.”
The book’s focus is Christmas; the “other winter feasts” mentioned in the title include New Year’s Eve and Guy Fawkes (which seems like a rather gruesome thing to celebrate).
Of course there are recipes that include expensive ingredients such as caviar (with baked jacket potatoes and lemon crème fraîche, and in mackerel tacos) and truffles. But there are also recipes for turkey with all the trimmings (and suggestions about what to do with the leftovers, such as Scotch eggs, croquettes and turkey broth with dumplings), various types of pie (fish pie with carrots and parsnip mash, portobello mushroom Wellington, mince pies), traditional British dishes such as cock-a-leekie soup, shortbread, Christmas pudding, fruit cake, and bubble and squeak with stilton, and child-friendly recipes that include malt and five-spice biscuits, chocolate fondue, and sausage rolls.
