Nigella’s perfect Christmas is positively postmodern
Last month, I asked: “Which would you rather be bitten by: a vampire or a zombie?” That seemed to excite some interest, so I will try a similar framing device again. Let me ask you the seasonal question: “Which would you rather bite: a turkey or a goose?”
This question differs, somewhat, from the previous one. My answer to the first would be “neither, if it’s all the same to you,” and my answer to the second would be: “both, if you’re offering.” I’m greedy. But we’ve reached the time of year when yet again, in colour supplement after colour supplement, telly special after telly special, we are invited to decide.
“Down with boring old turkey!” is the theme of one. “Make turkey sing!” is another. The conventions governing the media’s Christmas food coverage baffle me. It’s as if the food pages have been the subject of a takeover by the fashion pages: one in which “turkey” serves in the role usually occupied by “black.”
One one level, the reasoning is clearly this: we need to tell people, over dozens of pages and “definitively,” how to cook Christmas lunch. We did this last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, yet we can’t be sure that they haven’t forgotten. And the theme has to be turkey… or not-turkey, where the quiddity of the not-turkey is entirely defined by the not-ness of its relationship to turkey. If you see what I mean.
Whose palate is so jaded that it needs a fresh twist on a meal they eat only once a year? Yet here, weirdly, it is: every year the same people tell us the same thing—do something different. Ritual is usually about repetition—but here it’s about repetitive variation. It’s what you might call same difference.
How many ways are there to roast a turkey? Once you’ve got the hang of taking it out of the fridge the night before and wrapping its legs in foil, you’re pretty much there. Away with your barding and your basting and your Chinese five-spice rub and your buttery muslin (having a baby, we use muslin for something different in my house—and it’s not making ricotta).
Yes, yes, you only feed six or so people from a goose, whereas a turkey will handsomely provision up to 44 hungry lumberjacks. But turkey is awfully dry, isn’t it, unless you do that trick of Jamie’s? Or is it Heston?
And they say turkey’s traditional, waff waff, but it’s a ghastly American import and wasn’t it a goose they’d have been eating in the 19th century, eh? There’s that Sherlock Holmes story, isn’t there, where Tiny Tim gets stuck in a goose’s crop? It’s the bit in the neck, I think. Sort of a pouch. Not sure. Brandy?
If you want a goose, mind you, you need to have ordered it from bespokorganiceinternetgeeses.com in March. And there’ll always be one celebrity chef who jumps sideways and tells us that, at Christmas, he prefers a forerib of beef, and sets about telling you how to roast it. It’s exhausting. But it’s also, perhaps, a key to what’s really going on. It’s all a big literary-theoretical experiment, rather than anything much to do with food.
Most celebrity cooks are required to provide Christmas entertaining tips to a whole portfolio of outlets, and the good-looking ones are in a particularly invidious position. I’ve already lost count of the number of Christmas issues this year that have led with photographs of Nigella Lawson. It’s positively postmodern: the colour-supplement foodie’s equivalent of Katie Price telling (at last!) the true story of what’s she’s really thinking to all magazines everywhere simultaneously.
Were he of a culinary cast of mind, and alive, Jorge Luis Borges might write a short story about a glutton chasing the chimera of Nigella’s perfect Christmas through a decade’s worth of Novembers in the Colindale newspaper archives.
The protagonist would start with those canapés for the Sunday Times in 2004; the controversial ham in Waitrose Food Illustrated in 2005; the clever way with a turkey in Observer Food Monthly 2006; the declaration for goose in the Sunday Telegraph that same year; the cranberry sauce-with-a-twist in Hello!, the bread sauce in Standpoint; and then the complex work of summation—or is it another red herring?—between hard covers: 2008’s Nigella Christmas, which offers the promise of closure… but then whips it away. As I said: same différance.
The hero of this story seeks closure of his own. He gathers every Christmas recipe Nigella Lawson has ever published. And then—here Borges drops the baton and Rabelais picks it up—he cooks and eats it all. It takes him years… and each Christmas, as she issues more recipes, the task ahead of him increases.
I’m not sure how the story ends. I haven’t started to cook yet. But as the turkey says: gobble, gobble, gobble.
Last month, I asked: “Which would you rather be bitten by: a vampire or a zombie?” That seemed to excite some interest, so I will try a similar framing device again. Let me ask you the seasonal question: “Which would you rather bite: a turkey or a goose?”
This question differs, somewhat, from the previous one. My answer to the first would be “neither, if it’s all the same to you,” and my answer to the second would be: “both, if you’re offering.” I’m greedy. But we’ve reached the time of year when yet again, in colour supplement after colour supplement, telly special after telly special, we are invited to decide.
“Down with boring old turkey!” is the theme of one. “Make turkey sing!” is another. The conventions governing the media’s Christmas food coverage baffle me. It’s as if the food pages have been the subject of a takeover by the fashion pages: one in which “turkey” serves in the role usually occupied by “black.”
One one level, the reasoning is clearly this: we need to tell people, over dozens of pages and “definitively,” how to cook Christmas lunch. We did this last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, yet we can’t be sure that they haven’t forgotten. And the theme has to be turkey… or not-turkey, where the quiddity of the not-turkey is entirely defined by the not-ness of its relationship to turkey. If you see what I mean.
Whose palate is so jaded that it needs a fresh twist on a meal they eat only once a year? Yet here, weirdly, it is: every year the same people tell us the same thing—do something different. Ritual is usually about repetition—but here it’s about repetitive variation. It’s what you might call same difference.
How many ways are there to roast a turkey? Once you’ve got the hang of taking it out of the fridge the night before and wrapping its legs in foil, you’re pretty much there. Away with your barding and your basting and your Chinese five-spice rub and your buttery muslin (having a baby, we use muslin for something different in my house—and it’s not making ricotta).
Yes, yes, you only feed six or so people from a goose, whereas a turkey will handsomely provision up to 44 hungry lumberjacks. But turkey is awfully dry, isn’t it, unless you do that trick of Jamie’s? Or is it Heston?
And they say turkey’s traditional, waff waff, but it’s a ghastly American import and wasn’t it a goose they’d have been eating in the 19th century, eh? There’s that Sherlock Holmes story, isn’t there, where Tiny Tim gets stuck in a goose’s crop? It’s the bit in the neck, I think. Sort of a pouch. Not sure. Brandy?
If you want a goose, mind you, you need to have ordered it from bespokorganiceinternetgeeses.com in March. And there’ll always be one celebrity chef who jumps sideways and tells us that, at Christmas, he prefers a forerib of beef, and sets about telling you how to roast it. It’s exhausting. But it’s also, perhaps, a key to what’s really going on. It’s all a big literary-theoretical experiment, rather than anything much to do with food.
Most celebrity cooks are required to provide Christmas entertaining tips to a whole portfolio of outlets, and the good-looking ones are in a particularly invidious position. I’ve already lost count of the number of Christmas issues this year that have led with photographs of Nigella Lawson. It’s positively postmodern: the colour-supplement foodie’s equivalent of Katie Price telling (at last!) the true story of what’s she’s really thinking to all magazines everywhere simultaneously.
Were he of a culinary cast of mind, and alive, Jorge Luis Borges might write a short story about a glutton chasing the chimera of Nigella’s perfect Christmas through a decade’s worth of Novembers in the Colindale newspaper archives.
The protagonist would start with those canapés for the Sunday Times in 2004; the controversial ham in Waitrose Food Illustrated in 2005; the clever way with a turkey in Observer Food Monthly 2006; the declaration for goose in the Sunday Telegraph that same year; the cranberry sauce-with-a-twist in Hello!, the bread sauce in Standpoint; and then the complex work of summation—or is it another red herring?—between hard covers: 2008’s Nigella Christmas, which offers the promise of closure… but then whips it away. As I said: same différance.
The hero of this story seeks closure of his own. He gathers every Christmas recipe Nigella Lawson has ever published. And then—here Borges drops the baton and Rabelais picks it up—he cooks and eats it all. It takes him years… and each Christmas, as she issues more recipes, the task ahead of him increases.
I’m not sure how the story ends. I haven’t started to cook yet. But as the turkey says: gobble, gobble, gobble.
