Victorians

As the Victorian age got under way in the 1830s there were many underlying ideas which remain familiar today. Notions of hospitality, of conviviality, and of eating too much and getting drunk were already established and became even further embedded. Certain foods – roast beef and plum pudding, mince pies, turkey and brawn – were, despite declarations to the contrary, not universally eaten, due mainly to cost and accessibility, but they were linked overtly and increasingly exclusively to the festive season by most of the population. There were stirrings, already, of the changes to come: a re-evaluation of what Christmas should mean, of who should be involved, and of how much more could be sold off the back of it. In culinary terms, this was the grand age of codification, and that included Christmas dinner.