The Boxing Day leftover feast is as much a part of many people’s Christmas as Christmas dinner itself. Turkey curry is a mainstay, but a terribly English smorgasbord of cold cuts pepped up with Christmas chutney is hardly a rarity. It is, perhaps, the one time of the year when leftovers are celebrated, rather than regarded as sad sloppy seconds.
Attitudes have changed. With meat at a premium, leftovers were previously an important part of household meal planning. In wealthy households anything uneaten from the top tables was fair game for the servants. Both ideal and real menus from houses with staff show that by the Victorian period, at least, they were integrated into menus, rather than left for a free-for-all. Cre-Fydd’s Family Fare, from 1865, includes the usual roast beef, boiled fowl and plum pudding on its Christmas Day menu for the family, along with roast goose and plum pudding for the servants. On the 26th upstairs are on cold beef, and minced fowl, and on the 27th, beef in ‘acid sauce’ and croquettes of fowl (essentially breadcrumbed meatballs made with minced cooked meat). Downstairs finish up their own goose and then move on to the beef joint which is still hanging around from upstairs. Nearly a century later, staff menus from the household of Winston Churchill include numerous references such as ‘2 pieces of fish from dining room luncheon’.123 Until the Second World War, in the richest households, anything still left would be parcelled up to be distributed to the poor.
