Before we start ...

‘There is one day of the year where English cuisine unfurls all its banners and shows itself in its national colours. This day, waited for so impatiently by the biggest eaters as much as the small, is Christmas Day.’

In 1904 French chef Alfred Suzanne attempted to sum up the importance of Christmas in England to his fellow cooks. It was, he concluded, all about the food. There were ‘hecatombes of turkey ... massacres of fat beef ... mountains of plum puddings and thickets of mince pies’. Whether you were destitute, poor, middle-class, or the richest lord in the land, you aimed to feast, to have a meal beyond the ordinary, made up, on this one day, of a list of foods so specific to the English Christmas that they were scarcely seen at any other time of the year.¹