The problem with a Christmas menu is not a lack of flavour. There is too much fat, too much sugar and too much weight, and by the third week of service every dish on the board starts tasting like the one before it. The usual reaction is to add more. Almost always it is the other way round: you do not need more punch, you need more depth, and depth is built early, not at the end.
It works in layers. What goes into the stock is never identified on the plate, but it holds the plate up. What goes on at the pass is identified immediately and holds nothing up. Confusing the two is what makes a piece of lamb taste strong and flat at the same time.
The stock is where the work happens
It is the part almost nobody seasons, and the part that rewards it most.
The place for cloves is the studded onion: half an onion with three or four cloves pushed into the flesh, dropped into the stock, lifted out when you strain. It is the backbone of a proper bread sauce, and it is the difference between a gravy that tastes of something and a gravy that tastes of flour. Cloves need liquid and time; added late, or ground over a finished plate, they go straight to the dentist's chair.
Juniper berries are the berry of this season. Crushed in a mortar and worked into a marinade for venison, or into a braise, their resin cuts through fat — exactly the job a table of rich food is asking for. With goose, with pork, with dark sauces built on red wine. If you have ever eaten good braised red cabbage and felt there was something behind it you could not name, that was this.
And Ceylon cinnamon deserves to leave the dessert section. The cinnamon most kitchens use is cassia: coarser, sweeter, and the reason cinnamon tends to bulldoze a savoury dish. Ceylon is finer and sits behind everything else without covering it — a quill in a lamb braise, or in red cabbage, gives the dish a floor without anyone saying "this tastes of cinnamon".
The roast, and the gravy that comes off it
Here is a common mistake: rubbing the bird with pepper before it goes in the oven. Pepper does not improve after forty minutes at 180 ºC; it sits in the heat and loses the part that made it interesting. On the bird, salt and fat. Tellicherry pepper goes in afterwards, into the skimmed gravy off the heat, or straight onto the plate at the pass.
The roasting tin is also the best place to finish what you started in the stock: a few crushed juniper berries in the reduction of a duck give back the resinous thread the fat had eaten.
The sides, where the meal is won or lost
Braised red cabbage with apple and a quill of Ceylon cinnamon stops being the side nobody remembers. A parsnip or celeriac purée wants nutmeg, but grated at the last second: cooked long it turns bitter and settles into that jar-like aftertaste everyone recognises. The same goes for creamed spinach and, above all, for the stuffing, where nutmeg and clove work together if the clove has already come through the stock.
The pass
Whatever you add off the heat has to be noticed, because that is the whole point of it.
Tellicherry pepper ground to order — not before service, to order — over red meat, or in a mignonette for oysters: pepper freshly cracked, shallot, vinegar, very little else. Its citrus notes are what lift a fat bivalve.
And Viking salt over a whole fish as it leaves the oven, over a seared scallop, over a tartare. It is smoke without a smoker, which in December, with every oven spoken for, earns its place. One warning: it is not a neutral salt. It carries onion and turmeric, so it does not stand in for flakes. Taste it on the actual dish before it goes on the menu.
And the pudding, which does not have to taste of the supermarket
Christmas pudding and mince pies arrive loaded already. What tends to be missing is a counterpoint, not more sweetness on top. A cream infused with a Ceylon quill and pulled off in time tastes of cinnamon; dusted over the top, it tastes of dust. One clove — one — in the wine reduction for poached pears changes the whole plate. Two ruin it.
If you take one idea from all this, make it the first one: the flavour that stays is the flavour that went in early and cooked slowly. What you add at the end only decides the first mouthful.
Over the next few weeks we are going to take this down to the actual dishes on a December menu: how to roast a bird so it does not dry out, the fish course, what to do on the day after, and what to drink when it is over. One recipe a week, with times and quantities.
0 comments