The Roasts of Christmas Past

We start with the most important of all, the turkey, which is the British national bird.

'It's a meal loaded with symbolism.'

Everyone just thinks, "It's time to have a drink, might as well."

'It's the day every TV chef looks forward to.'

My heart sinks and you just think, "What is the point?"

'So how has Christmas dinner changed over the years?'

The food that we were aspiring to back then probably wouldn't make it into most people's bins.

'How has television helped change it?'

We've gone from turkey to "Why don't you try goose?" to "Why not try roast beef?"

What next? Barbecued Dalmatian?

'And is the meal we sit down to watch still the meal we sit down to eat?'

-Reindeer ice cream? Please!

-That's what I call crackling.

'Here's Christmas dinner as seen on television

'in The Roasts Of Christmas Past.'

# Chestnuts roasting on an open fire

'Television has always loved turkey.

'Christmas dinner has all the ingredients for drama and comedy.'

They don't have turkey at Christmas.

Who don't?

Eskimos.

'But television doesn't just share our Christmas meal.

'For more than 50 years, it's been showing us how it's done.'

Hello and welcome to my little series on Christmas know-how.

What I hope to do by sharing my own Christmas with you

is give you just a little bit of help along the way.

And in the next 30 minutes, I'm going to show you how you can think ahead,

make life an awful lot easier

and I promise to give you the perfect Christmas.

What the British public have always craved from their TV chefs

is the secret of the perfect Christmas.

They want the code. They want to know how they can make it work.

The truth is that cooking is brilliant television.

People love to watch it, it makes you hungry, it's cheap television

and I think the trick for chefs is that they have to find an angle.

Every summer, the calls start coming in for me.

They say, "Stefan, we want to do something different at Christmas."

-Doesn't everyone want to do something different at Christmas?

-Wow.

'The successful chef can enter the seasonal psyche. They can clear the supermarket shelves.

'They can make or break our Christmas.'

All I wanted was just a day like Nigella's! That's all I wanted, was it to be like Nigella's.

In the old days, we were just trying to get it as good as our mother's,

but now we're trying to have a Delia twist

or a Jamie twist or a Nigella twist.

'So what do Christmas cookery shows tell us about our times?

'And how have they changed through the years?'

It becomes less about the cooking. It becomes all about the style.

You can chart the progression of Britain through the economic age

of the 20th century by these cookery programmes.

APPLAUSE

'In theory, we shouldn't need the TV chef.

'Christmas should be a piece of cake.'

You know, in Escoffier,

the recipe, the method of cooking a turkey

just says, "Roast in a moderate oven".

You know? Is that too difficult to follow? I don't know.

'Perhaps it's the scale of the meal that unnerves us.'

It's not just the complexity of the meal itself

which takes it out of the normal reach of most home cooks' experience,

but also the fact that you're cooking for so many people.

Cooking for four or six is quite straightforward.

Suddenly when you're cooking for 12 or 16 or even 20,

it's very, very hard work.

The cooking of it is one thing. It's dishing it all up.

That's the hardest bit!

Save up some money, invest in a few staff at Christmas.

'For those of us who can't get the staff, television is here to help.

'But today's top TV chefs have to cook with their hands tied.

'Metaphorically.'

We sort of struggle, because it's got to be that meal.

The broadcasters don't want to get lost. They want the turkey to be in there.

They want the Brussels sprouts. Don't mess with the Brussels sprouts. But they want a different take on it.

I'm a fairly traditional guy.

I do believe turkey's the right thing for our British Christmas.

A good turkey. An old-fashioned turkey.

Not the Dolly Parton of turkeys that we see nowadays with these massive great breasts.

I'm not a huge fan of the parsnip.

When I was a kid, I once mistook a roasted parsnip for a roast potato

and it left such a scar on my psyche

that I always prod around a parsnip with caution.

I love the Brussels sprout. One of the few, I know, but I do.

And I love to see a little pain on the children's faces,

cos they've had so much enjoyment in the morning opening their presents,

they need a little pain, as well.

'Limited by their ingredients, the TV chef is also imprisoned by the past.

'We had a winter feast long before Jamie. Even before Jesus.'

You've got to remember that this is an old Pagan festival.

We've had this stuff here in the past.

At this moment in time, people would have a feast.

It's Christmas. It is also around new year. It's feasting time anyway.

Having a festival in the middle of winter always seemed like a good idea,

and so there's the time when you had the fire festivals

and interestingly, when we flame our Christmas puds, it's harking back to that idea.

I think it is the last remaining feast and, of course, I feel that's very sad.

But at least it's still there. And I think it does make people nervous because it has to be good.

'If the Christmas meal is the most traditional in the culinary calendar,

-'there's one Christmas in particular we want to recreate.'

-Merry Christmas!

I think Charles Dickens has an awful lot to answer for.

Here we are, 150, 160, however many years down the line,

and we're still labouring under the myths, the images

that dear old Charlie Dickens created for us.

Hey! Do you know whether they've sold the prize turkey that was hanging up?

-Not the little one, the big one.

-They're selling it now.

-Buy it.

-Go on!

-Oh, no, I'm in earnest! Tell them to bring it here! Come back with the man and I'll give you a shilling.

Do it in less than five minutes, I'll give you half a crown!

It's in Dickens' Christmas Carol. There was a turkey at the end of it.

So now everyone plans to buy a turkey, it's huge, most of them are pretty grim.

Everybody wants what they think is a traditional one.

I don't know how traditional you want to be. Maybe we should send kids up chimneys

or garrotte someone in an alley for a farthing. But we seem to think that this bygone era was a better era.

-'The roasts of Christmas past would haunt us into the television age.'

-God bless us, every one!

'While TV remade The Christmas Carol,

'TV chefs would remake the Christmas dinner.'

Cook, the biggest turkey in the poulterer's!

Now Tiny Tim will be well again!

-Is it defrosted?

-LAUGHTER

-Well, I...

-You see, the trouble is,

people buy these huge, beautiful great turkeys

and haven't got time to get them defrosted adequately or thoroughly.

'We've come, in time, to trust them with our biggest meal.

'The twists they gave it were often a matter of taste.

'But for the first lady of television cookery,

'it would be a matter of necessity.'

Good afternoon and welcome to our demonstration.

This afternoon, I have several dishes to show you,

including a favourite of mine, baked gammon with apples and mushrooms.

Marguerite Patten became an institution in Britain.

She was hugely respected.

Before I put in the cabbage, you'll notice I drop in a good knob of margarine.

I loved what Marguerite did all those years ago

because it was the beginning of why people like myself or Jamie or whoever it is

are on television now, because it made it possible.

'Marguerite Patten made her name on the radio during the war,

'infusing Britain's housewives with the Dunkirk spirit.'

People shared that feeling of, "We're in it together and we'll all pull out of it together."

We called ourselves the kitchen front.

Things like turkeys and fat for roasting potatoes in

and the amounts of sugar that we use and the fruit and all the other frills of chocolates

and the bits that we really like on Christmas Day were always unobtainable.

'In a time of rationing, Marguerite's wartime recipes

'summed up Britain's can-do attitude.'

I wasn't letting anybody be sorry for themselves. I wouldn't sympathise with you

cos you hadn't meat, I'd have just chivvied you along

so that you felt you were living on the fat of the land.

I made a film which was all about what Christmas was like on the home front in the Second World War.

So rations have kicked in, the U-boats are patrolling the waters,

you can't get much into the country, and you're very unlikely to get your whole turkey,

or even a chicken, and so you have to make do.

And the result was coming up with what were called mock goose or mock duck.

An awful lot of breadcrumbs. A lot of chopped apple.

And you would shape it into something that looked a bit like a bird and roast it.

So I made one of these with a social historian and then served it up to Marguerite Patten,

who said it really wasn't far off what it would've been like in the Second World War.

-What do you think of our mock duck?

-I think it's extremely good.

It would be a good savoury main dish.

-What do you think of it?

-Erm, I can actually imagine

sitting down on Christmas Day in a period of wartime and being quite satisfied by this.

It was horrible. As was the paraffin cake.

'By the 1950s, rationing was over and television was emerging as a mass medium.

'Marguerite pointed the way to a bright new future.'

Attention, ladies and gentlemen. The electric cooking demonstration by Miss Marguerite Patten

will start in exactly two minutes.

Marguerite Patten? Marguerite Patten.

That's the TV cook. She's awfully good.

Oh! Well, we'd better go and see. Come along.

Marguerite Patten was a great saviour to the nation

because people were coming out of the forces having never really cooked,

setting up house, wanting to learn to cook, which is why Marguerite Patten's BBC Cookery Club

in the early 50s was a huge success.

Now for the menu.

A very useful sort of menu suitable for washing day because it needs no attention at all.

She's appearing in the 50s. Rationing has only just finished.

Not only do people not know how to cook, they've forgotten how to cook.

What Marguerite Patten's saying to you is, "There's butter and currants in the shops,

"go and buy them, you've got ten years' worth of money from working on munitions to spend on it,

"go and buy it, get back into the kitchen

"and I'll show you how to make something that doesn't taste of victory pie."

Here we are. Doesn't it all look nice?

In fact, we might say we have a meal fit for a queen.

Isn't it wonderful when you see old footage like that? It's amazing.

'In 1954, Marguerite cooked up her legendary Christmas pudding.

'A thousand Christmas puds would follow on TV,

'but none of them quite like this.'

So come across and meet Marguerite Patten OBE. How are you?

I'm fine. I love making Christmas puddings

because it's the start of that lovely feeling of excitement, a bubbly feeling inside.

I remember when Marguerite came on the show

and we were talking about her Christmas pudding and all the things that went into it.

We're really going back almost to wartime days.

-Grated carrot.

-Yes.

-Cos, of course, carrots were our lifeline. They went in everything.

But even today, I still like carrot in the pudding

because it gives it a nuttiness and flavour.

'But it was another ingredient that shocked the 50s audience.'

And then we come to the alcohol. I like using old ale or stout,

but if you'd rather use some of that and some of rum or brandy, fine.

And that goes in.

The letters that she got about that! The complaints that she got!

Because at that time, they were "intoxicating the nation"

which meant that perhaps we couldn't go to work the next day.

I think Churchill was equally guilty at the time.

When I first used alcohol in 1954,

the BBC had a very, very stern letter.

I and Winston Churchill were corrupting the youth of Britain.

I because I was cooking with alcohol, he because he was drinking it.

'With Marguerite's boozy pudding,

'the relationship between television, cookery and Christmas was consummated.

'By the 60s, TV was starting to play a big part in our festivities

'and showing those festivities back to its viewers.'

-Is custard all right with Christmas pudding?

-White sauce is better.

You don't want anything to lie too heavy, do you?

-Merry Christmas, all.

-Hello!

-Merry Christmas.

I'm a big Coronation Street fan and I think those early years,

the black and white years, really were...

It was just a completely golden era.

-Will you give Dennis custard?

-I'll give him a thump round the ear if he goes on like he has been.

The stuffing's worrying me. I was thinking of using that packet stuff. Maybe I should make my own.

There's an early episode where you've got Ena, Minnie and Martha

sitting around a table eating Christmas pudding,

all with a bottle of milk stout in front of them, which is fantastic,

and Ena chokes on a sixpence.

-It's a classical pudding.

-Lovely.

-Oh, I am glad.

I don't think you can beat it well matured.

-SHE COUGHS

-Shall I bang her on the back?

No, don't. I'll get you a drink of water.

Don't bother. Have you been maturing it with raisin stalks in it?

Oh, no, I pick them most particular, Ena. It's one of my pleasures.

Just as Christmas is a common experience on television,

in terms of us all sitting down and watching the same shows,

so is the Christmas dinner a common experience, we all sit around the table and tuck into turkey.

'But when television reflected on this shared experience,

'it was usually seen as a source of conflict.'

Oh, God love us, sit down!

It's a mark of respect, innit!

It's your national anthem!

Not in front of the television set in your own home.

Listen, you traitorous Scouse git! LAUGHTER

I've got a bit of respect for Her Majesty, I have.

She has to have her Christmas dinner late cos of doing that speech.

-She has to go up to the BBC...

-I hope they put it in the oven for her.

-She has to go up to the studio...

-He'd see to that.

-She has to go...

-He'd make sure it was kept hot for her.

Shut up, you silly moo!

'By now, post-war austerity was giving way to a new world of aspiration and affluence.

'The new face of TV cookery broke with the make-do-and-mend spirit of the past.'

Introducing before an audience of 7,000, Fanny and Johnnie Cradock.

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please glance at your programmes?

Marguerite Patten to Fanny Cradock is Delia Smith to Nigella.

And Fanny Cradock was a decade later and she was glamour incarnate.

And so now we are going to put in for you

the little bit of first Elizabethan turkey grandeur.

We see Fanny Cradock on stage at the Albert Hall.

It was being terribly, terribly extravagant. "Oh, this is the way you do it."

And it was the voice, too. You had to be terribly, terribly posh.

The tail feathers mounted and proud.

And the head mounted as for the first Queen Elizabeth.

Nobody wore a taffeta ball gown to cook in like Fanny Cradock.

That was the hilarious part about Fanny. She was completely overdressed for the job.

Fanny and Johnnie carried on with the business of piping a pattern of chestnut puree around a serving dish

in readiness for the traditional Christmas turkey.

She swung about with such style and she had her attentive Johnnie, always with a glass in his hand.

No, Johnnie, not at the Albert Hall.

I suppose, looking back, that was quite revolutionary for the time.

It was almost a Morecambe and Wise play on cookery, wasn't it?

-I've been watching that fella on television.

-Who?

-Danny Cradock. LAUGHTER

-Who?

-Danny Cradock.

-Fanny Cradock!

Well, it's his own fault. LAUGHTER

For shutting the oven door too quickly.

'If Marguerite was the first TV cook,

'Fanny was the first celebrity TV cook,

'loved or loathed for her persona, not her recipes.

'She didn't do a Christmas series till the 70s, but it was worth the wait.'

Fanny Cradock having a series on cooking for Christmas was a real breakthrough.

We start with the most important of all, the turkey,

which is, after all, the British national bird.

This curious pinching movement that I'm doing here

is to loosen the skin

so that afterwards, I can put my hand underneath

and run it right through the skin

so that it holds right away.

I love just how practical the show was and how it showed you

in real time how to prepare birds for cooking for Christmas.

And she had a lot of banter and I thought she was amazing.

I'm no women's lib, don't think for a moment. I'm not such a clod.

But there are times when men do make fools of themselves.

Haven't you seen them getting scarlet in the face and struggling with the bird when they do the carving?

Fanny made it really fun and it made the woman somehow the queen.

"Men can't carve," you know. "Only women can carve if you do it my way."

Remember to leave the skin on your mushrooms and put them in like this.

How good her recipes were, I have to say, I don't know

cos I've never used them.

# So this is Christmas

'Outside Fanny's kitchen, these were hard times.'

The official advice to Britain's housewives was "Don't panic".

There's still only the threat of a strike, but they didn't seem to be paying much attention to that

in the morning rush to the bread shop.

'Luckily, Fanny was there to rally the nation.'

Look at the different cooks appearing. You can chart the progression of Britain

by these cookery programmes, and Fanny is very, very squarely in the middle of Britain in decline.

And may I say how much I admire the housewives of Britain

in these appalling present conditions for their courage is trying to give their families a super Christmas.

It's all very 70s and it's all very three-day week. Things are very basic.

The presentation style is quite East German. It's all very straightforward.

She's glamorous, the cooking isn't.

Here are the pink cream buns.

There are the little miniatures for very special parties which keep so well. And those are coffee eclairs.

I think everybody should watch Fanny Cradock

just for the pure humour of it.

Now there, instead, is a Christmas goose.

The kind of thing that a maiden aunt that you always have because she's lonely on Christmas Day

or some other elderly lonely person says,

"Oh, I can't eat goose because, you see, it does repeat so!"

There is not a single vegetable cooked during How To Cook At Christmas.

But that's because everybody in Britain knows how to cook vegetables in the 70s. You boil them.

There's a school of thought in France which says that if an omelette looks perfect, it doesn't taste perfect.

Which sounds odd.

Because you don't want it to get like leather while you're putting in the mincemeat.

It's a bygone era, and just look at the food, not that we were eating, cos we weren't eating that.

The food we were aspiring to back then probably wouldn't make it into most people's bins.

So like Tiny Tim, God bless you all, I say.

'Fanny's achievement was more cultural than culinary.

'She took cookery out of the kitchen and into the television mainstream.'

I saw that one where you shoved all those mushrooms up the chicken!

-LAUGHTER

-My mother and I were enchanted!

It was that special one where you shoved them all up inside the skin!

-Off you go now.

-Run the rolling pin all the way round the edge.

'Television was starting to realise the power of festive food

'to hold an audience.

'The force of Fanny's personality did the rest.'

She did emerge at a time when Saturday night television

was starting to make a serious impact.

And Saturday night television is a very hungry beast. It's constantly looking for innovation.

You take this rolling pin. It has to be heavy enough to knock me out

and I've been knocked out hundreds of times. When I go to the barbers now,

-if I haven't got a mark on my head, he says, "Is the old woman ill?"

-LAUGHTER

It says a lot for her personality that she was able to sit in that world and make an impact.

A minute and a half to make a lovely Fanny Cradock mince pie starting from now.

'If cookery now had a small part on Christmas television,

'television had a huge part in our Christmas ritual.'

In the 70s, when there were only three channels,

the whole nation, it seemed, sat down to watch the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show. It was holy writ.

-Is it done yet?

-I'll have a look. COCKEREL CROWS

LAUGHTER

Almost. APPLAUSE

'And the dinner itself had become a staple of seasonal sitcom.'

-I suppose everybody would like a bit of breast.

-I've never refused.

-And stuffing?

-I've never...

-Shut up! LAUGHTER

Comedy writers seem to go there again and again and again.

And you think, "Why?" But we all know why. It's the perfect vehicle.

Help yourselves to gravy and cranberry sauce. Any luck?

Afraid not. I'm afraid my novelty's gone forever.

-I could've told you that years ago.

-LAUGHTER

The Christmas meal is a gift, for sitcom especially.

You have a lot of people in a small area.

They have to follow certain traditions which everybody recognises.

You have all of the tensions, all of the complaints.

You have a perfect set-up for comedy.

If everybody's got everything, I think it's time for a toast.

-A Christmas toast.

-Oh, yes, certainly, happy to oblige.

It's the sort of idealised 70s Christmas

which means it must be liberally sprinkled with

arguments, repression and cliche.

After all, that's what Christmas is all about, isn't it?

'Christmas, with its ancient traditions and ritual, now seemed laughable.

'Turkey in particular was tough for telly to take seriously.'

And you get your butter, it should be nice and soft,

and just stuff it right up in the ribcage.

-Three quarters of a pound.

-You see, Marlon Brando did this in a film.

THEY LAUGH

'We could count on television to entertain us over Christmas

'but could we really entrust it with the making of the meal?

'Fanny had diverted us, but we needed a safe pair of hands.

'Television was about to step up to the plate.'

I had read an article in the Sunday Times that said what Britain needed

was a sort of culinary Mary Quant

to do for English cooking what she had done for fashion.

And that sort of struck a chord with me.

If you want good advice, good sound advice, out of all the TV chefs there's ever been, Delia.

Delia is just THE best teacher.

She really did believe in showing you how to boil an egg

and do things really simply.

People trust her. They know her recipes work and she tells them slowly what to do.

And here I am with one pound of beautiful chuck steak.

And today I'm going to make a Mexican dish and that's called chilli con carne.

'Out went the flamboyance of Fanny, in came a phenomenon that would confound the critics.'

It's very deadpan. There are planks of wood that could probably present better than she does.

Taste that and tell me what you think about it.

Mm.

But if you listen to it, it's all there.

Everything you need is there and the food looks good.

Hello again. This week, seeing as we're on the brink of winter,

I'm going to talk about cold weather foods

and I'm going to start off with real homemade soup simply because,

well, with tins and packets being so convenient, we don't make it very often nowadays.

'Delia was cooking for a changing nation

'but fighting a familiar rear-guard action.

'With supermarkets on the rise, she championed home-cooked food

'in a world of ready meals and working mums.'

It's been said that a lot of British cooks

are not prepared to spend time in the kitchen using cheaper cuts. Do you think this is true?

Women have not got the time. Either they go to work or they have the kids to pick up. Everything is a rush.

She was cooking for the people who hadn't really been taught to cook so much by their mothers,

who were just so excited by the supermarket and the beginning of tinned and frozen food

that old ways of cooking were going out of the window.

'Delia soon had the whole country eating out of her hand.'

Can I ask you a question? I've had a bet with my mother-in-law.

When you make a meat pudding, do you put raw meat in or precooked meat?

-Raw meat.

-Thank you, I've won £1.

'By 1990, she was ready for her biggest challenge.'

The phenomenon of Delia is extraordinary

and when else do you need cookery advice than at Christmas?

If Delia said that wearing paper hats makes the turkey taste strange, we'd all take our paper hats off.

In this series, I'm very pleased to be able to invite you all

into my own home here in Suffolk

to share in all the busy preparations that lead up to Christmas Day.

You start a few weeks ahead, and then the panic builds up

and you get to that big crescendo which is the Christmas lunch.

It's almost like the psychiatrist-patient relationship.

Famously, patients transfer all their hopes onto the psychiatrist.

And I think transference has gone on between the British public and Delia for a very long time.

So I think the best thing to do is to start off by making a list

and then tick them off as they all go in.

First on the list is actually making a Christmas cake.

What I want to do now is just help you to get organised.

'We'd moved on in the 15 years since Fanny. We'd left the studio

'and Delia showed us not just how to cook the meal, but how to source the ingredients.'

Which one should I choose if I was going to buy it and why?

Well, you'd want to choose one like this.

It's got a nice bit of fat to it.

-Yes, that's important for flavour.

-Yes.

'Delia helped us out with our Christmas shopping.'

So what I do year after year now increasingly

is actually do a lot of my shopping by post and use the mail order services.

'And she even gave us meat-free options.'

But actually, I myself don't really believe in vegetarian food.

I think anything that tastes good is suitable for everybody, whether they like meat or not.

Where Fanny would salute the women of Britain

for cobbling together a Christmas dinner in trying circumstances,

well, things are different now. What you're supposed to do

is make a bigger and better and fancier and more thoughtful

and more careful and more handmade and more tailored and more exciting Christmas dinner.

We've emerged from the 80s, the recession of the 90s hasn't happened yet,

everything's very comfortable.

Everything's very Delia.

And the cheese I'm using is this one here, which is a mozzarella cheese.

'There were new ingredients that would never have made it into Fanny's larder.

'And wine was now an integral part of the Christmas meal.'

-Now try your sticky toffee pudding.

-Right.

And now what we need to do is try the wine again. See how you think it tastes now.

-Much drier.

-That's right.

'Britain wasn't just listening, we were making notes.

'One word from Delia and sales went through the roof.'

And then there's a new ingredient that goes in next, something you might not have seen before.

The whole country ran out... I think it was liquid glucose when Delia Smith did some goopy pudding.

Now, you buy liquid glucose at the chemist shop

and I've got five tablespoons here which I'm going to put in with the chocolate.

My brother did it and he was so pleased that he'd gone to six chemist shops before he could find it.

The famous story of Delia Smith mentioning the cranberries

and then there being a cranberry rush like there's a run on the banks.

They put in one key ingredient, everywhere will be sold out.

It's a fascinating new phenomenon, this idea that some herd instinct overtakes us at Christmas.

Television is an incredibly instant thing.

Everybody does it and then everybody forgets about it.

'But the concept of the Christmas cookery show hadn't changed since the 50s.

'We were still being given instructions.'

I think one of the interesting things about the three female chefs

is that they are nice, well-educated, middle-class people

and they speak like nice, well-educated, middle-class people

and I strongly suspect that they speak to that particular audience,

which means there is a very large audience which has been excluded.

'And the centrepiece of Christmas dinner?

-'That hadn't changed, either.'

-Now the big moment when the turkey arrives.

I'm not sure if any of us know why it's a turkey,

it just is a turkey, because that's what's happened before.

I've got six ounces of butter here and I'm going to spread that all over.

The symbolism of a Christian meal doesn't need to involve a turkey

or parsnips or Brussels sprouts. I think it's one of those extraordinary situations

which is quite powerful where simply because of familiarity,

it's become a deep, deep part of our culture.

And remember, it starts off at the higher temperature, gas mark 7.

Now it's time to make my very favourite sauce, which is bread sauce.

'Delia's Christmas reflected the Delia brand.

'Dependable, reliable, doable.

'She, too, had become part of the culture.'

Right, so, I've prepared all the other ingredients well in advance.

All that remains is to stuff this little chap with prunes in Armagnac.

-Oh, great.

-Lovely!

-Ah.

Er... Prunes in tequila.

The thing about Delia is that she's foolproof. So here you have a fool trying to cook Christmas dinner.

If you come out with an episode of a sitcom

where the comedy lies in the inability to follow a Delia recipe,

it tells you everything you need to know about the possibility of following a Delia recipe.

You have to be a total idiot not to be able to do it.

He tapped into that common experience that we all have

of the fantasy Christmas and the real Christmas.

According to Delia, we should be at

-"Slide palette knife around pudding and turn out onto warm plate."

-Yeah, well, bugger Delia.

We all approach Christmas thinking that the family are going to be brought together,

that everybody's going to like their presents,

that the turkey's going to be delicious. All those things. We all expect that from Christmas.

It's got a lovely, crisp, brown, golden skin now.

The reality, invariably, is not quite as wonderful as that.

And it also, of course, tapped into that other constant running theme

of the man trying to cook the Christmas dinner.

'Christmas dinner had always been a traditional meal,

'but Britain had changed since Marguerite Patten's day and so had its cuisine.'

Wherever you're from, you tend to bring your Christmases with you

where you end up, and as a Caribbean person,

our parents brought our Christmases from Jamaica here.

A lot of immigrants that came into the country, they wanted to fit in

so they went down the turkey route,

and roast potatoes, that type of thing.

But there was the rice and peas and there was lots of different vegetables.

You know, it wasn't just a case of putting Brussels sprouts out there,

they mixed it with beans and crispy onions and garlic and a little bit of cumin or something like that.

It was very difficult to find recipes or chefs that you could identify with as a Caribbean person.

What we saw on TV from Fanny and everybody else on TV wasn't exactly how we cooked as Caribbeans.

Over the next few programmes, we'll look at some rather unusual menus,

and tonight we turn to the Caribbean for inspiration. Rustie, what have you got for us today?

Hello, everyone. I've got some swordfish, it's really great.

This is the start of the Christmas breakfast for every Caribbean person, if they...

I remember Rustie came along with this gargantuan laughter and this kind of expression of herself.

And every Caribbean person waited for her to come on to switch on

so that you can identify with the food that she was doing.

Fantastic. I say bring back Rustie, she's brilliant.

# Christmas, Christmases in England

'Soon we'd start to see a few new faces. And new takes on cooking Christmas.'

The stuffing is a sort of Persian-Indian mixture which I've worked out.

I've tried it, it's wonderful, it's slightly sweet.

We're very lucky that we do have a great sophistication

relatively for curries, thanks to all the Indians and Bangladeshis

and Pakistanis in this country.

-Look at that!

-It's not real Indian food, but it's a traditional English dinner with an Indian accent.

'The new influences would transform the British Christmas. Up to a point.'

People are now readier to experiment

not on the basics, the basics of Christmas remain the same,

the turkey remains the same, the sprouts remain the same,

the roast potatoes remain the same.

We are very fond of spices and so on, and certainly in the trimmings,

but they're not going to knock the old tradition of its pedestal.

DOORBELL

-What do you lot want?

-You! Now come on, Gary, get real, we've got a Christmas special to make.

-Don't I even get Christmas off?

-No, you're joking! But we've got a present for you.

Right, now you're talking!

'By now we had a new-found interest in food. And for some, new wealth to indulge it.

'Our tastes were becoming more cosmopolitan. Britain was getting out more.'

By the time you get to the 80s, presentation is different,

because now people go to restaurants and recognise what they look like.

You don't have to go just on your birthday.

What Gary Rhodes attempts to do is show you that you can cook as if you're in a restaurant but at home.

Now it's time to cook. And what am I going to cook for you?

Well, it's Christmas time, and what do we always have? Turkey.

Gary Rhodes is essentially the Delia strand of instructional cookery

but taken one degree on.

Let's give it a little Italian twist and this one's called Turkey Saltimbocca. Does that sound nice?

He obviously is a restaurant chef, first and foremost.

He's very precise, very deliberate, but what he also is is someone who doesn't compromise.

There you've got a lovely cranberry and orange relish.

Because I really want to make this a wonderful, colourful dish.

Look at this. And if you don't want to do this, don't worry, just put it on the table.

He's a good communicator, he's very good at explaining stuff.

Despite the fact that he does have a few rather irritating ticks that come up.

Make sure you've got your own Christmas antlers.

-All the time.

-I mean, would you wear this?

He had such a big on-screen persona,

but he never lost sight of the instruction he was giving across.

Plunge into boiling salted water and cook without a lid.

These two points are very important, they both help keep that beautiful rich green colour.

'But showing people how to do the sprouts was starting to look old hat.'

Do you fancy a night on the town? Come on, then.

# I don't want a lot for Christmas

# There is just one thing I need

'Gary gave us a glimpse of the roasts of Christmas future.'

# Underneath the Christmas tree

The thing about cookery programs today

is they're not just as they were with Fanny Cradock,

or indeed with Delia, which were lessons in how to do.

They are selling a lifestyle.

'Where Fanny had brought cookery into the world of entertainment,

'Gary brought entertainment into the heart of cookery.'

So here I am, in the city of London, cooking on ice...

I worked with Gary for over ten years and he did quite a few Christmas specials.

And it seemed as if each one they wanted to push him further away

from what would have been seen as practical and useful.

'Soon it wasn't enough to cook Christmas dinner, you had to do it in New York.'

That's the biggest sandwich I've ever seen.

Can you believe it? Cooking in a limo on Fifth Avenue. Amazing. This is a brilliant dish for you,

nice and easy at Christmas, just have it on toast, it's brilliant, it's going to be a smoked eel pate.

What you are actually watching is entertainment. If you look at Fanny Cradock,

Formica kitchen counter,

two Belling cookers, plastic bowls, there's no backdrop, there's no set,

there's a Christmas tree that disappears out of shot within seconds of her appearing,

and then she just cooks.

By the time you get to Jamie and Nigella, by way of Gary,

who does a bit of scooting around and driving around, the cooking is secondary.

Everything is about the look.

Naked is what I call my way of cooking.

What I cook in the restaurant isn't what I cook at home.

Cooking has to be a laugh. It's got to be simple. It's got to be tasty. It's got to be fun.

The important thing to recognise with all food television

is it's not about the food, it's about the personality of the people involved.

No way. It's not me, it's the food.

I mean, somebody like Jamie, everybody loves Jamie.

He's a nice kid and you want to listen to people that you trust.

'Fittingly, modern television cookery had its epiphany at Christmas,

'when TV discovered Jamie working as a lowly chef at the River Cafe.'

I know this seems like quite a bit of an effort,

but it's really worth it for your Christmas dinner, isn't it?

Well done, Jamie, that's beautiful. Shall we just... What we didn't do is put any of this on the top skin,

-and we did talk about it, so shall we just...

-Rub it?

-Rub it down like that.

Jamie was a chef at River Cafe at the time when that filming took place, and as he himself said,

it was just fluke that he had a shift that moment when they were there filming at the restaurant.

He was chosen maybe because he has the gift of the gab.

This prosciutto has been rubbed with garlic. Lovely-jubbly.

The next day, he got six phone calls from different production companies,

and he kept thinking it was his mates phoning up and taking the piss.

'It had taken Fanny 20 years to get her Christmas show. It took Jamie just three.

'He seemed to capture the spirit of Yule Britannia, where cooking was fun and Christmas was cool.'

What you saw was what you got on and off camera.

Right, me old darling, I've got a mad dessert idea.

It's a replacement for Christmas pudding.

I don't really get on with it, all those raisins and sultanas do me in.

We watched Jamie because he was fun to watch, he had a great way of speaking, moving...

Thank God for this machine, saved me a bit of old wrist work.

His cookery was very casual and not quite as, dare I say, stiff and instructional as Delia and Gary was.

And I think the audience was ready to move on with him.

Give it a peel, and keep peeling it, and you end up with lovely little strips like that.

Having fun in the kitchen has turned things on its head

from the kitchen being somewhere you shiver with nerves and open Delia to make sure you've done it right.

'Jamie took Christmas cookery even further from the old filmed lecture format.'

In the past, it was a lesson. Here's how to not screw up Christmas lunch.

And here's how to do the basic elements.

I think now, it's much more of a "Join me in my wonderful life."

"Wouldn't you like to be me?" is what he is saying.

There's no doubt that the programme is about Jamie's lifestyle,

rather than just the food that he's suggesting you cook.

-How are you?

-Lovely to see you.

'Delia had invited us into her beautiful home for Christmas. Jamie introduced us to his family.'

Mum's doing some parsnips over there, which, if you don't mind, chop them into half...

He's a boy from Essex with his parents and with his grandma and all of that,

and they all just seem like normal people

who manage, perhaps due to the amount of time the cameras have been around, to be themselves on camera.

I used to have to say, "If you listen very carefully,

-"you can hear Father Christmas..."

-Mum, shut up!

-"..in the distance"

And he always used to say, "I think I can hear him!"

That's what an audience wants. They want to feel comfortable when they watch someone.

And Jamie is very, very good. In fact, he is much better at television than he is as a cook.

Hey! Happy Christmas, everybody!

'And something else had changed. The Christmas cookery show was as much about consumption as the cooking.'

There is one major significant difference

between Christmas cookery programmes before the 90s and after the 90s.

Before the 90s, what they were doing was showing you how to make the food.

That's it. They assume that you know how to provide the family.

By the time you get to Jamie, everything is fragmented.

Or the assumption is that everything is fragmented.

You have to be shown now how to have dinner round the table with everybody.

You have to be shown how to have Christmas with friends or family.

That's part of the instruction.

'TV cookery had grasped a truth about Christmas dinner that TV drama had always known.

'It wasn't the meal that was the problem, it was the people.'

-The first toast is to the chef.

-ALL: The chef!

I think the tragedy of modern life is so few people do sit down and eat with their families.

So when Christmas comes around, they desperately want to have this family atmosphere and everybody sitting down

but they're not used to it and maybe they're not used to cooking. And so the tension is there.

Look, Chrissie has spent all morning slaving over this hot turkey so that we can all have a nice lunch.

If you have arguments with each other, this isn't the right day.

'The strain was starting to show on television, too.

'The relationship between TV and Christmas, once so exciting, was in danger of becoming over-familiar.'

COCKEREL CROWS / LAUGHTER

A few more minutes, I think.

Every time Christmas comes around,

I think broadcasters and TV producers go, "What are we going to do this time?"

In the soaps, they do it by building a big storyline up,

which reaches its crescendo on Christmas day.

Let go of her hand! Let go of it!

There's usually a death, a heart attack, a divorce, or something, a mugging, whatever it might be.

Could you not have waited till after dinner?

But there is always the fairy lights on in the background.

'Nowhere was the heat fiercer than in the TV kitchen.

'With so many cooks now jostling for space in the schedules,

'we were all under pressure to come up with something different.'

Now we have chefs coming out of every kind of TV channel as soon as we switch it on and it's Christmas.

I am constantly asked to do an alternative Christmas thing,

and you just think, "What is the point?"

It's really hard to come up with reinventing the wheel.

I've got food and travel magazines from the 50s and 60s,

some of the American magazines, And I scramble through there,

trying to find new ideas, or old ideas to be reinvented.

'And not only do you have to reinvent Christmas, you have to do it in summer.'

One of the programmes, we actually did it,

it was about the time when the BBC were getting very nervous about telling the truth,

so there was a bit of a thing, "Do we have to tell people that this is actually July not Christmas?"

So we set the whole thing up with lots of decorations,

then we came out to my garden and there's all the crew drinking beer in their shorts.

It's looking really quite Christmassy now. Can we start?

-Yeah.

-Well, come on, it's Christmas!

As a greengrocer, what really annoys me is all these food magazines

asking me for out-of-season produce

so they can do their Christmas photo shoots. I don't care!

It's September. I can't find you parsnips, Brussels sprouts,

neither can I find you chestnuts. They don't exist right now.

'Eventually we'd end up doing Christmas

'where Christmas doesn't exist.'

They asked us to make a programme about Christmas,

we thought, "How can you make Christmas in Thailand?"

But then, of course, we thought, "17 ways to deal with too much turkey." And it worked a treat.

We came up with all kinds of stir-fries and salads

and things to do, curries, as well.

So it was a way of getting out of a slightly tricky situation

which is, how do they celebrate Christmas in Southeast Asia?

Answer, they don't.

-Would you do something like this in Thailand?

-Not really.

-No?

Because we usually found turkey in the zoo.

Christmas is the burden that the brand has to carry.

Rick and Nigella and Delia and Jamie all weave their magic,

but I bet you if you asked them, they would say, "Do you know, I'd like to pass on Christmas this year."

I have my very own ghost of Christmas that haunts me and jolts me awake at night.

-BANG ON DOOR

-My nightmare is this.

People dropping in, last-minute family gatherings,

all the seasonal socialising which should be joyful.

But, oh no, in my anxiety-provoked dream, this terrible, terrible thing happens to me.

My fridge is bare.

As if!

Nigella Lawson is the most extraordinary confection.

# Merry Christmas, baby

You must remember this is a woman who was political columnist with The Observer for a long time.

And now she is the domestic goddess. And maybe you do pick up a few recipes

but really you tune into Nigella to watch her waft.

Right! Let's get to it. I've got my bowl of Christmas gravy cheer,

but first, I'm going to release the turkey from its briny bath,

and yes, I did get these in my Christmas stocking.

Well, Nigella is all about sex, she's selling...

The amount of times she licks her lips

and looms wonderfully forward over whatever she's cooking, she's a delight.

And this needs to simmer now for about two hours, and I suppose I ought to go and get dressed.

"Yum-yum!" she says all the time, licks her fingers.

Fanny Cradock was very busy saying, "I have washed my hands, haven't I?"

You know, Nigella goes...

'Nigella's Christmas was extravagant, indulgent and knowing.'

I am going to break away from the crowd for a moment to do some last minute frying-up of the crab cakes.

'And like all great Christmas cooks, Nigella had her own effect.'

This is my recipe for the perfect roast potato.

These have been parboiled. But instead of dredging them in flour, as is the usual practice,

I dredge them in semolina.

Why? Why would you do that?

There's a sweetness to semolina and a slight graininess that makes them incredibly crunchy.

It creates this horrible crust.

If you've got poor teeth, that's certainly going to damage the teeth.

'Luckily, no-one at Nigella's parties had poor teeth.'

What Nigella is doing is making us all lustful.

We want not just to cook the food that she cooks,

but we want to have her friends and drink from those lovely glasses

and we want her money, her glamour, you know, it's just fantasy.

I have devised my plan of action, and I use it year in, year out.

And I'm not just enthusiastic, I am evangelical about it.

Denise Royle wants to have a perfect Nigella Christmas

in the Royle Family Christmas special, even though her house looks nothing like it,

even though she can't cook and she doesn't have the ingredients.

-Time to parboil the potatoes, which simply means...

-Have we got a parboiler?

No, combi-boiler.

The thing you have to understand is that all TV cookery

is television first and food about fourth down the line.

So it's literally impossible to create in your own house

the kind of Christmas that they show on TV.

And all I wanted, all I wanted for was just a day like Nigella's,

that's all I wanted was for it to be like Nigella's.

SHE SOBS

One of the most infuriating things about Christmas cookery programmes these days

is the fact that you're not provided with a list of the ingredients.

Because part of the aspiration is that you want the book.

Now, you're getting the book whether you like it or not because that's the present.

I've got all the TV cooks' books, Nigella's and Delia's and I think Jamie probably,

and it's amazing, you know, the sales of those things.

Do people follow them? I think they like to have the book there.

You need a book, even though you've been there before, it was 300-odd days ago,

and even though you have four or five books on the shelf

that will tell you exactly what want, you want to know what the modern twist is.

Christmas is a fantastic time of year for produce and food in general.

-Do you have any real Christmas favourites?

-I love the whole thing.

But this year my traditional Christmas cake recipe, which has now been in print for 40 years,

is going to be the easiest thing ever.

'Cookery shows and the books that went with them were now just part of a greater Christmas story.'

You begin to see this alliance of the marketing planets, can't you, over Christmas?

When there's the supermarkets, and there's the chefs,

and frequently, of course, the chefs are used in advertising by the supermarkets.

Cinnamon. Try it with icing sugar on your mince pies.

Newspapers play a part in this, magazines, everybody is getting in on the act.

A lot of the chefs now do work with the supermarkets, they are virtually sponsored by them.

The supermarkets are also advertising in the space between the cookery shows,

and then they stack the ingredients on the shelves that the chefs suggest.

They're coming at us from all angles.

There's something about the smell of the home-baked Christmas cake...

We're not stupid. We know what everybody's motivation is,

television programmes want ratings, supermarkets want to sell more stuff.

But the truth is we enjoy it. That's why we do it. And, you know, why not?

'While the marketeers and ad-men were content to bathe Christmas in a warm, nostalgic glow,

'one chef was looking to the future.'

My restaurant has three Michelin stars and has been voted

one of the best in the world.

Now I'm bringing my multi-sensory approach to cooking

to deliver a once-in-a-lifetime Christmas meal unlike anything ever seen.

'2007 saw television reinvent the Christmas meal one more time.

-'And instead of sex...'

-I think Heston Blumenthal is all about interesting science, really.

He's making us think differently.

Now to the meal. I decided to create a frankincense tea to include in my dish.

Now, the idea with this is to make an extraction at a lower temperature of frankincense.

He is clever. He is very, very on the ball,

and it's not all about what is not allowed to be called molecular gastronomy,

cos I don't know what you call it, but a lot of it is about

looking at food and doing a very nice, attractive spin on it, really.

Now take a glass cloche and place it over some roasting chestnuts, into which the smoke then rises.

The idea with this is that the guests when they first take the soup,

they pull the jar off and turn it upside down.

Then they get the full impact of the smell of chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

'Here was a chef who'd travel to the ends of the earth to create his signature dish.'

I can't kill Santa's little helper for my Christmas lunch, but I do have an idea.

Reindeer ice cream? Please.

Well, I'm milking myself a reindeer. Never thought I'd see the day.

The thing about Heston is, you know, Heston is a brilliant guy, but it's an honest meal,

it's not something that we're trying to reinvent really. I don't think we should be trying to reinvent it.

The great thing about this technique is that because the nitrogen is minus 197 degrees centigrade,

the ice crystals that form are tiny, making the ice cream really creamy and smooth.

It's actually, in a way, far more honest than the likes of Jamie or Nigella's programmes,

because while Nigella and Jamie are saying,

"Oh, if only you could do what we do, you would have a marvellous Christmas."

Now, Heston, there is not a chance in hell you'll ever try any of this.

My nitro-scrambled reindeer milk ice cream on toast.

It's a scientific programme. You might as well have Magnus Pyke presenting.

-Oh, that's nice, isn't it?

-It's not any less entertaining for that, but it is far more honest.

This is amazing.

'After half a century,

'it seemed the links to instructional cookery had finally been severed.'

'And the moral of this story?

'Don't do this at home.'

Heston is a wonderful man. Lovely man. Very few have got Heston's touch, passion or ability.

Don't go there, people! Don't go there. It will all end in ruin.

'It's a message that would have shocked the TV chefs of the past.

'But at the end of it all, how much has our Christmas dinner really changed?'

The turkey was the most desired bird in the 1950s as it still is now.

The same complaints about Brussels sprouts were uttered in 1955 as are now being uttered in 2011.

'And how much do we really want it to?'

We come back to tradition year after year after year.

The families all come together. Even when they hate each other.

I don't like a lot of the traditional British Christmas lunch.

I don't like dry turkey, I don't particularly like dull stuffing,

but does it make me feel at home?

Does it make me feel warm and confident and, I suppose, British?

Yeah, it does.

# Everyone dancing merrily

# In the new old-fashioned way

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]

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