Home for Christmas with Fay Maschler

FAY MASCHLER

The Evening Standard’s restaurant critic dreams of gathering up her far-flung family, but this year is heading to Cornwall. She lives in Fitzrovia

The number of Christmas dinners I have cooked I measure by the age of my eldest daughter. Hannah is 42. There were, of course, the years before children (BC) and the times when others kindly shouldered the load — my stepdaughter Amy doing that brilliantly last year — and there was the miserable moment just after splitting from my first husband when we all went to a restaurant.

Restaurants are good for every day other than Christmas and Valentine’s Day. So for one reason and another I am sticking with a count of 42. Hannah has been living in New Zealand for the past 12 years — her going can’t have been because of the bread sauce because my sister Beth makes the best bread sauce on the planet — and Hannah’s sister Alice is usually in India where she runs a primary school in Tamil Nadu. My son Ben, his wife Jane and their three children not long ago moved away from London to Wiltshire — in his case it might have been the bread sauce — and consequently Christmas these days is less predictable but certain traditions live on.

The first dish of the day is always kedgeree. Smoked Finnan haddock can be poached to opacity in milk the day before, basmati rice also precooked and finely sliced shallots gently gilded, leaving only the assembly with the addition of turmeric to the hot oil, and then finishing with butter and a dab of double cream at Christmas brunchtime. Champagne is champion with this assembly. Nigella Lawson introduced me to the concept of brining a turkey and it is without any doubt the best way to introduce some verve into this stolid, one suspects not very bright, bird. Star anise, black peppercorns and slices of orange added to the salty water with an insouciant shrug are now all a part of the festive gavotte.

A tip I am happy to pass on is that cockerel is an unsung hero as the golden boy on the Christmas table. They can weigh up to seven kilos and have more flavour than turkey and chicken put together. I buy Packington’s free-range cockerel from genial John Bartlett at Chef & Butcher, located within The Natural Kitchen, a restaurant/deli on Marylebone High Street. If you are imagining the stringy creature of coq au vin think again. These chaps grow slowly and probably while away the time reading Sunday supplements.

Stuffing can lend interest. Beth and I let rip, mixing minced pork with finely chopped bacon, onions, celery and garlic, flavouring with shreds of chilli, ginger, parsley and soya sauce and adding texture with stale breadcrumbs (not too many) and toasted pine kernels. Cooking the mix separately means that the bird can spend less time in the oven and there is something interesting to eat on the plate, which I try to keep free of too many ‘trimmings’.

A surprise virtue in my second husband and patient restaurant companion, Reg, is an enthusiasm for Christmas rare in an adult. He loves it all — the plotting, the wrapping, the secrecy connected with presents and ‘especially leftovers and the tin of Quality Street’. More religiously inclined than I, he was delighted when I brought back finely carved unpainted wooden Nativity figures that I found in a Christmas market in Merano in northern Italy. In their stable knocked up by Yuric, the Polish handyman we have come to rely upon, posing neatly and quietly in the fireplace, they have replaced the tree, a move not altogether applauded by the grandchildren. But Yuric, I can tell, approves mightily.

We round up waifs and strays or people we know who otherwise might be alone for Christmas meals and sometimes, instead of individual presents, we have a ‘bran tub’ filled with those polystyrene bobbles used for posting fragile gadgets. Presents buried in there are colour-coded for age and gender by the wrapping. A dream Christmas would be having my three children and two stepchildren and all their children — 11 in total — together in one place and a bran tub as big as The Ritz.

This year my Christmas dinner count won’t rise to 43 since Reg and I are irresponsibly going away to let others do the work at Hotel Tresanton in St Mawes. I just hope they know about the long, murmuring steeping of onion, bay leaf and cloves in milk for the bread sauce.