How to Eat (12 page)

Preheat the oven to 400°F and keep it at this temperature for the first 30 minutes. Then turn it down to 350°F.

For the following weights of turkey (stuffing included, remember) you need to cook it for about these times:

Weight
            
Time

5pounds              1½ hours
10 pounds            2 hours
15 pounds            23⁄4 hours
20 pounds            3½ hours
25 pounds            4½ hours

It is not possible to give one serve-all timing based on minutes per pound; this time decreases as the weight of the bird increases. For such information, you should consult those who are selling your bird to you.

Baste regularly throughout the cooking time and turn the bird the right way up for the last half hour of cooking to brown. I use no foil, as some do, to retard browning or retain moisture, but if you want to use it, add an hour onto cooking time—and still remove it for the last, breast-burnishing half-hour.

To see for yourself that the turkey is ready, poke a skewer or fork where the thigh meets the breast, and if it is cooked the juices will run clear. Or use an instant-read thermometer, in which case the bird is done when the thermometer, plunged into the thickest part of the thigh, registers 175°F–180°F.

GRAVY

Now for the gravy. I am not one of life’s gravy makers. I make disgusting coffee, too; obviously, brown liquids are not my thing. This one works, though.

Make the giblet stock well in advance. Keep the liver covered with milk in a dish in the fridge till you need it.

giblets from the turkey

1 bouquet garni (see page
xx
)

4 peppercorns

1 medium onion, halved

1 medium carrot, peeled and quartered

1 celery stalk, roughly chopped

bacon rind (reserved from making the chestnut stuffing), if available

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 tablespoon Marsala

Put the giblets, except for the liver, in a saucepan (that’s to say the heart, neck, and gizzard), add the bouquet garni, the peppercorns, onion, carrot, and celery, and bacon rind, if using, and cover with 4 cups water, sprinkling over the salt. Bring to the boil, cover, lower the heat, and simmer for about 2 hours. Strain into a measuring cup. Set it aside if you’re doing this stage in advance, or else get on with the next stage, which takes place when the turkey’s cooked and sitting, resting, on its carving board.

Pour off most of the fat from the roasting pan, leaving behind about 2 tablespoons plus all the usual sticky and burnt bits. Put the pan back on the burner at a low heat and, in a separate little bowl, mix together the flour with, gradually, 3–4 tablespoons of the liquid from the saucepan. When you have a smooth, runny paste, stir it back into the pan. Cook for a couple of minutes, scraping up any bits from the bottom and incorporating them, but make sure the pan’s not so hot it burns. Still stirring, gradually pour in 2 cups of the giblet stock, or more if the mixture seems too thick, bearing in mind you’re adding the liver later.

While the gravy’s cooking gently, leave it for a moment (though keep stirring every now and again) to fry the liver. To do so, melt the butter in a small pan and toss the liver in it for 1–2 minutes, then remove to a board and chop finely.

Add the liver to the gravy. Add the Marsala and stir well, cooking for another few minutes, before pouring into a couple of gravy boats. Since first making this gravy, I have bought a blender and would now add a little more of the giblet stock, say 2½ cups, and blend the gravy after the liver has been chopped and added.

POTATOES

You should parboil and roast the potatoes as instructed on
page 253
, and use goose fat if you have any (it can now be bought from some specialty markets, especially at Christmas). Otherwise, vegetable oil will do. The oven the turkey is in is not hot enough for the potatoes. If you don’t have a double oven, you can leave the turkey to sit while you’re blasting the potatoes.

BRUSSELS SPROUTS AND CHESTNUTS

I know there are chestnuts in the stuffing, but I’d put still more of them in with the brussels sprouts. I don’t suggest you peel your own; buy them in cans or jars. What makes a difference in preparing this is the butter you add after cooking; don’t refrain from using the whole quantity. And season well with pepper and fresh nutmeg.

For 10 people, buy about 1 pound sprouts and ½ pound canned whole chestnuts. Roughly chop the chestnuts so that some are cut in 2, some in 3; that’s to say, you don’t need them whole, but nor do you want mealy rubble. After you’ve cooked the sprouts—lightly—drain them and melt about 8 tablespoons (1 stick) of unsalted butter in a large saucepan. Toss the chestnuts in the butter and then add the sprouts. Add salt, pepper, and fresh nutmeg and coat well with the butter in the pan before turning into a couple of warmed bowls.

You need other vegetables too, but if you’re a large group of people, it cuts down the possibilities of what can be done easily. Delicious though a bowl of sharp-edged-tasting shredded cabbage would be (see
page 335
), you hardly want to stir-fry a large amount at the last minute. But you do want crunch. Barely blanch a bowl of sugar snap peas. Or buy some already prepared broccoli florets and toss them, just cooked, in butter to which you’ve added a little sesame oil. And I know it’s untraditional, but green beans are not a bad idea. I wouldn’t mind one puréed vegetable as well, though it’s not crucial. You could prepare it much earlier, even the day before, so it doesn’t add too much horror. Puréed Jerusalem artichokes would be my choice.

BREAD SAUCE

This is essential for a true English Christmas lunch. For 10 people you need:

2 small onions, each stuck with 3 cloves

1 bay leaf

4 peppercorns

blade of mace or ¼ teaspoon ground mace

3½ cups milk

salt

1½ cups fresh bread crumbs (see
page 22
)

2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter

2 tablespoons heavy cream

whole nutmeg

Put the clove-stuck onions, bay leaf, peppercorns, and the blade of mace (or sprinkle the ground mace over) into a saucepan with the milk. Add a good pinch of salt and bring to the boil, but do not actually let boil. Remove from the heat, cover the pan, and infuse. I tend to do this first thing in the morning when I get up, but if you forget or can’t, then just make sure you get the infusion done about an hour before eating.

Back on a very low heat, sprinkle over and stir in the bread crumbs and cook for about 15 minutes, by which time the sauce should be thick and warm. I have to say I don’t bother with removing any of the bits—the onions, the peppercorns, and so on—but you can strain the milk before adding the bread crumbs if you want to. Just before serving, melt the butter and heat up the cream together in another saucepan, grate over quite a bit of nutmeg, and stir into the bread sauce. Taste to see if it needs any more salt or, indeed, anything else.

CRANBERRY SAUCE

We always had cranberry sauce out of a jar at home, which is why I’m fond of it, as I am of horseradish sauce out of a bottle, too. But both, truly, are better freshly made. Cranberry sauce is so easy as not to be worth even hesitating about.

1 pound cranberries

1 cup sugar, plus more, if desired

2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter

zest and juice of 1 orange

1 tablespoon Grand Marnier (optional)

Put the cranberries, sugar, butter, juice and zest of the orange, and Grand Marnier, if using, in a saucepan. Add ½ cup water and bring to the boil. After a minute or so’s fierce bubbling, lower to a simmer and cook for about 10 minutes, until the berries have popped and you have a thick, fruity sauce. Taste to see if you want more sugar, then decant into a bowl and let cool before serving. Don’t panic if it’s still fairly runny, though, as it solidifies on cooling.

I have to say I have never yet made my own Christmas pudding, the traditional Christmas lunch finale. I will, I will. One day. But buying one seems an entirely sensible thing to do (see
page 462
). And I pass on a tip I’ve learned from Coping with Christmas, coauthored by Fanny Craddock, the renowned British TV cook: use vodka in place of the brandy for flaming the pudding. Apparently it burns for much longer. Fanny boasts of keeping the flame alive for 11 minutes on a TV spectacular she did at the Albert Hall.

But I do make my own brandy butter, the usual pudding accompaniment, to go with my unashamedly bought one, the brandy butter of my childhood. I have recently taken to making an odd sort of semifrozen rum sauce, too, which is a variant of the eggy, brandy-spiked cream a friend of mine makes.

BRANDY BUTTER

This is what was always traditionally called hard sauce, but somehow it looks affected and quaint to call it that now. I add ground almonds—because my mother did, so it’s the taste I know, and because they give it a glorious marzipanny depth and velvetiness.

You need the butter to be as soft as possible before you start, but not at all oily. Obviously, it makes life easier if you can make this in a machine, either a mixer or processor; I prefer the former.

10 tablespoons (1¼ sticks) unsalted butter, soft

2 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

½ cup ground almonds

3 tablespoons brandy, or to taste

Beat the butter until creamy, then add the sugar and beat them together till pale. Mix in the ground almonds and, when all is smooth, add the brandy. Add a tablespoon at first, then taste, then another and see if you want more. You may find that the suggested 3 tablespoons is far from enough; it is a question of taste, and what is lethally strong for one person seems insipid to another. You must please yourself, as you can’t please everyone.

ICED RUM SAUCE

This is a sort of rum-sodden and syrupy egg nog with cream that’s kept in the freezer until about an hour before eating. You put it on the searing hot pudding and it melts on impact. It’s odd, but it works.

¼ cup heavy cream

2 egg yolks

2 tablespoons golden syrup (see
page 460
) or light corn syrup

2 tablespoons dark rum

Beat the cream until stiff. In another bowl, beat the yolks until extremely frothy. Add the syrup and rum to eggs, still beating. Then fold this egg mixture into the cream. You could serve it straightaway, as it is, un-iced; the plan, though, is to put it in the freezer to set hard and then transfer it to the fridge, allowing it to ripen for about an hour so that it’s frozen but beginning to flop by the time you add it to the hot pudding.

MINCEMEAT

Mince pies, I feel, are a bit like Christmas pudding: you may as well buy one. I once made my own mincemeat—adding quince in place of the more usual apple, and eau de vie de Coings instead of the brandy—but it was years ago and I’ve still got most of it lying about. I am not, therefore, inspired to repeat the experience just yet.

What you can always do, if you want to go one step further than getting bought pies, is use about 1½ cups of the best commercial mincemeat you can buy and, a couple of weeks before Christmas, grate into it a cooking apple or a quince, stir in 3 tablespoons of rum, Grand Marnier, or eau de vie de Coings, add some chopped flaked almonds (about ½ cup) and the juice of half a lemon and half an orange each, and a bit of the grated zest of both. Then you’ll almost feel you have made your own mincemeat.

There are two ways of approaching the making of the pastry for your mince pies: either make tiny pies of about 2 inches in diameter (which I think I like best) and use a plain pastry dough (see
page 37
), binding the dough with iced, salted orange juice in place of water, or make them the usual size, 8–9 inches in diameter, but out of almond pastry (see
page 264
). For the small pies, cut out circles of dough, put in tartlet tins, add a scant 1 teaspoon of mincemeat to each, and top, not with a round pastry lid, but with a star stamped out with a specially shaped cutter. About quarter of an hour in a 400°F oven should be fine. For the bigger pies, use an almond pastry base and top with a dollop of frangipane. Cook at 400°F for about 10 minutes, then at 350°F for another 15–20 minutes.

LEFTOVERS

BUBBLE AND SQUEAK

This dish, which consists of fried mashed potatoes and cabbage, has an unexpected buttery and nutty resonance when made with brussels sprouts. Though the sprouts have become something of a byword for the culinary awfulness of a British Christmas, my absolute favorite Christmas Day or Boxing Day supper is a bubble and squeak made by frying leftover, roughly chopped sprouts with an onion and some mashed potatoes in a pan, then topping it with a fried or poached egg, and maybe some crisp, salty bacon.