The second course

Extravagance is a necessary part of feasting. The courses must be more numerous than for an ordinary meal, but also more lavish. This is true even in institutions. Raw army recruits are given a special meal at Christmas (one regiment where I witnessed the officers serving lunch to their men allowed two pints of lager to each squaddie, and the turkey wasn’t even overcooked). In prison, where policy demands that treats are rare, Christmas is marked by a meal of better quality food. Indeed, on Christmas Day in the workhouse, as Sims’s poem tells us, ‘the guardians and their ladies . . . put pudding on pauper plates’. As for the paupers, ‘so long as they fill their stomachs,/What matter it whence it comes?’.