Stuffed: The Great British Christmas Dinner Timeshift

Christmas dinner. For some of us, it's heaven.

I think it's the perfect meal. It's absolute heaven to me.

Conviviality, family, wider society, eating in the middle of winter.

For others, it's hell.

The three most depressing words in the English language,

"all the trimmings."

Christmas dinner, when we're expected to get together full of the spirit of good cheer,

stuffing our faces and drinking ourselves into oblivion.

A time when class, anxiety and bad temper

all bubble up and spew forth over the dinner table.

It's in women's DNA to feel totally resentful about the Christmas meal, you know, when they're born.

-I've never cooked Christmas dinner.

-I've never eaten one of these.

It's one of "these" that is the prima donna in the great drama we call Christmas dinner.

There is a tremendous amount of theatre with it.

I think that's good actually.

Like all great theatrical productions,

Christmas dinner has its stars, stage managers and script writers.

And then you begin the process of lubricating the dry bird.

It's a time just for family.

It was one of the only occasions, really,

when the whole family came together.

That meant that all sorts of obscure cousins and aunts,

and people that one never saw at any other time of the year.

Christmas, the one time we let our hair down, put on silly hats and quite literally go crackers.

Whoa!

Right, that's me.

It is the last great feast in the British culinary tradition.

What do you call a sick crocodile?

An ILLIGATOR.

Christmas dinner, a love/hate relationship we have been in for years.

A feast that unites but also divides.

Christmas. The festive season.

Eat, drink and be merry cos tomorrow we snuff it.

Come on, liven yourself up a bit.

HE LAUGHS

At this time of year, one way or another,

we all end up...stuffed.

Christmas dinner, when a nation lives on the edge of nervous breakdown.

The enduring memory of Christmas is my mum peeling the potatoes, you have to peel.

You always do too much, throwing them like bullets into the water,

after she'd taken the peel off.

My sister and I just exchanging glances...

It's Christmas, Mum.

Well, I could do without it.

It may be a holiday for some, but, for me, it's just extra work.

At this rate I'll never be able to go out.

There's so many bits to it. I mean, it's kind of like the roast Sunday lunch, you know, 20 times over.

And you do have to do your timings right.

I mean, I do my own personal timetable every year.

It was a military exercise going on.

In this war, the orders are given,

the supplies are ready, everyone is in position, let battle commence.

Roast turkey and veg is not a very difficult meal to do anyway.

But it's sort of made to seem,

and probably by people like me, saying this is how you do it,

you know, at 9.30 you have to put the pudding on to boil, and...

It makes it too difficult.

In our home it was my mother who got up, she used to set her alarm,

she used to work it all out on Christmas Eve.

What time she had to get the turkey into the oven in time for it to cook,

because it was always enormous.

I have memories of her getting up at four or five in the morning to put it in.

Food writers fill our heads with, "Oh, you've got to put it in muslin,

"you've to brine it, turn it over, put it on this side, or that side."

It's more pampered than a baby by the time it comes to the table.

Actually, it's just a big chicken!

Put it in the oven and roast it.

OK, your prize turkey is plucked, basted, stuffed and prepared.

What could possibly go wrong now?

One year, we all woke up to find that there's no electricity in the house at all.

The turkey had been in, and I just heard my mother swear.

I mean, as if somebody had died. I just heard her shrieking.

It was like, "There's no electricity, no electricity!"

My father's going, "Calm down, calm down," and his proposition...

It's so set that we have to do this a certain way - we were all horrified!

"We'll have to do it on the barbecue."

Well, at least it's quick.

To be honest, if I drop the turkey on the floor and don't tell anybody,

it's not going to be the end of the world. I am not concerned about it.

Because I am a competent, confident cook,

even if I overcook it, I know that the most central thing is not

that they've come here to give me Michelin stars.

They're not coming to judge me for my excellence of my cuisine.

I hope they're coming because they're my family, they love us all,

and so they come to see us.

People are inclined to head for a nervous breakdown when they think

they've got to do Christmas dinner.

What is it? It's a roast dinner.

No more complicated than anything else.

Marguerite Patton was one of the nation's first TV cooks.

Her sage advice, for over 50 years, has given reassurance

to those trying to cook that perfect Christmas dinner.

Don't turn yourself into a martyr and don't get yourself in a state.

If you think about it, work it out, it's really a very, very simple meal.

Stuffing our faces at Christmas - it's nothing new.

We've been putting it away in the bleak midwinter for hundreds of years.

Feasting, as opposed to ordinary dining,

is always about conspicuous consumption.

It's about having more than you really need to satisfy your hunger.

It's about, "Look, eating is not simply a question of getting by."

It's not just a question of waving a fist at winter starvation,

it's, "We've got more than we could possibly need, we have an abundance here."

So whose bright idea was it to have a party in the middle of winter, when it's cold and wet?

It's really a way of marking the change of seasons and it's something

that human beings, as long as there's been historical records, have done.

The Romans did it, the Greeks did it,

everybody marks this particular change of season,

and it's got something to do, of course, with the solstice.

You mark the time when the days begin to get longer.

Feasting and merry-making has always been about showing off.

Keeping up with the Joneses.

Flashing the cash.

Profusion of food has always been an expression of power

and of, obviously, wealth and well-to-do-ness.

That both set out who you were, by how much you could put on your table,

and also bonded the social bonds of hierarchy, all the way down, and made people pull together.

It's always been the case that in periods of great feasting,

Christmas being one of them, the finest food is reserved.

The best cheeses kept, the finest hams cured,

the best green goose fattened and the best vegetables kept aside.

Few of us today share high table with the local lord,

but even in the most humble semi, we still enjoy the rituals of Christmas feast.

For a lot of us in our much smaller houses, with the central heating switched up too high,

it might feel something the opposite of a release,

it might feel like the tension's really building.

But at its heart, that's what it's all about.

Conviviality, family, wider society, eating in the middle of winter.

The feast element of Christmas lunch is admirable.

It's what you're feasting on, which,

I think, leaves an awful lot to be desired.

But the actual idea of feasts

and good fellowship and...uh...

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and carols and things like that I think are great.

I'm not sure about crackers.

Feasting is ritualised.

It has to have an element of ritual in it or it isn't feasting, it's just pigging out.

It has to have some content, some sort of rules and regulations, even if they're broken.

I think it is important that some of the rules and regulations have to do with the menu.

So follow the wisdom of the ancients.

Play those party games.

Drink a little. Find room for that extra helping.

Wear your silly hats with pride, and reach for the pagan inside of you.

If you think about the Christmas meal,

it has no religious significance whatsoever.

Nothing in it has got anything to do with the birth of Jesus.

I think, maybe, some people would enjoy it more if they could take the religious element out of it,

and think about feasting, the food, and think about having a good time.

I think it's the one day in the year we should be able to eat

whatever we want and sort of hang the health police. It's feasting.

I think that denying yourself things is bad for your health, to be honest.

Happy Christmas, everybody.

Happy Christmas.

Chances are, you'll be sitting down to a large plump turkey this Christmas.

But there's been something of a war going on between the big fella

and its feisty rival, the goose,

for a good few years, and the feathers still continue to fly.

The turkey lacks the flamboyance of the peacock

and you wouldn't even stuff your duvet with its feathers,

unlike those of its great enemy, the goose.

The poor bird has never had a good press.

Yet, every year, most of us turn to the turkey to be the centrepiece of our Christmas dinner.

Turkey has been eaten at times of feasting

since it was introduced in the mid-16th century.

It was Henry VIII who first introduced turkey at Christmas.

It substituted for goose.

This was because turkeys had been imported by the Spaniards from the New World

and that took off again in mid-Victorian period,

so what we've got is a colonial bird sitting at the centre of our British table.

It was the Victorians who elected the turkey to be bird of choice at Christmas.

And it was one writer, in particular, who puffed up the pretensions of the turkey.

Well, Mrs Beeton does say, in fact,

that for a nation of empire, for the middle classes,

that turkey is the bird for Christmas.

"A noble dish is a turkey, roast or boiled.

"A Christmas dinner, with the middle classes of this empire,

"would scarcely be a Christmas dinner without its turkey.

"And we can hardly imagine an object of greater envy

"than is presented by respectable, portly paterfamilias,

"carving, at the season devoted to good cheer and genial charity,

"his own fat turkey and carving it well."

So, turkey is taking over, from the 1860s, as the great, traditional bird,

carved by the paterfamilias at the head of the table. Very iconic.

You get Mrs Beeton making it quite clear that

paterfamilias should be portly first of all,

and how different that is from our own feelings.

These days he'd be off to the gym, absolutely no problem about that.

Also the way in which she knows that her reader may well not actually be

quite of the class that knows how to carve a turkey instinctively,

so she needs to provide instructions.

But those instructions are very, very technical.

They play on all the kind of middle class skills that we associate with this kind of new body of people,

these new technocrats of Victorian Britain.

She could well be describing how to build the Clifton suspension bridge.

It's got that technical quality that's going to appeal, particularly to her kind of reader.

When not building bridges or slicing turkeys,

the Victorians were a sentimental lot and none more so than Charles Dickens.

A Christmas Carol played a key role in the poultry war between turkey and goose.

There you are my boy, here's the address, there's the money.

In A Christmas Carol, the Cratchits initially have a goose,

but when Scrooge is re-educated, he sends "a turkey as big as a boy."

The whole point is that turkeys were bigger than geese,

so there was more food, it was more of a kind of gluttonous exercise.

But today, not everybody is convinced of the virtues of the turkey,

especially hardened food critics.

There's an awful lot of meat on a turkey and not much meat on a goose.

A goose will feed four adequately and six at a push.

Turkey just seems to go on forever.

You eat too much, you feel bloated.

It comes with the three most depressing words in the English language,

"all the trimmings."

Do we get turkey?

Well, they call it turkey, but not having seen it carved we don't know, do we?

And if it is, then the one we had on our block last year must have been funny shape.

28 legs and no breast.

Like Lulu And The Young Generation.

That's really good.

Even free range, community-minded turkeys, which give to charity and have led a good life,

even they taste too much like a turkey for me to have any enthusiasm about them.

Actually, I think turkey is a much maligned beast.

It's delicious. If it's not overcooked, it's a very good meat.

But its main function is to look spectacular.

Like the main function of a Christmas pud is to come in in flames.

It's festive, it's like fireworks.

The turkey gets a bad press, first because of people like my mother who destroyed several turkeys

in the course of her lifetime, and because it's very easy to cook a turkey badly.

It's a lot easier to cook a turkey badly than to cook a turkey well.

One year we had Peking duck, we decided to just have a completely different meal.

And we all loved it, but the next year we went back to turkey.

Or sometimes we'd have goose and then we'd go back to turkey.

So, turkey or goose?

What's this really about?

The reason that we eat turkey at Christmas is basically an economic one.

It's a very large bird that serves a lot of people cheaply.

Cheaper than goose, which is the next largest bird,

and so few of us can afford peacocks or swans any more.

When I got more into food as I got older, I wanted to have goose because I thought that was just

quite a lot more kind of foody, that was a lot more chic. And they taste better.

Goose is now found on more and more tables, encouraged by the most matronly of cooks.

Such a splendid thing a goose, isn't it? Wonderful creature.

I love them and what I love

is the masses of fat that is left that you can treasure.

I know, that's right. And even rub on your chest in a case of emergency.

Rub it on your chest or your boots!

Turkey or goose. It's also a question of exactly WHERE you are.

The Gotkin family, who farm at Minsterworth in Gloucestershire, don't buy their Christmas dinner,

they rear it, a tradition dating back in these parts to the 13th century.

The main course, although it doesn't know it, has just waddled through the gate.

Country people still prefer the rich, dark meat of a goose to the more recently fashionable turkey.

So now that you've dried baby's bottom, are you going to put talcum powder on it?

I'm going to pat it and prick it and mark it and put it in the oven, baby and me.

No, I'm going to stuff it!

I didn't think, we're going to have goose this year because that makes us really fancy,

I did want to eat the goose instead.

But I found that when I told others you had goose, I had to be careful,

because, "Oh, how the other half lives!"

Now this bird is between nine and ten pounds and it will take 2½ hours.

Now, we'll open this...

Hope it'll fit!

There were years where there were rows about oven space

because we did a turkey and a goose cos not everybody liked goose.

And also, goose, the flesh-to-bone ratio isn't great, so there's less meat when you do a goose.

Although the good thing about that is - there's no leftovers.

You eat it on Christmas and that's it, you're not making sandwiches.

No leftovers? What an affront.

Yet more heresy from the goose cult?

A turkey-free table may be a blessed relief for many,

but for some, leftovers are the best bit of the meal.

My favourite food of all is a sandwich made of leftovers and it's the one thing,

when the children have gone to bed when they're older,

when the parents are sitting back and having their whisky or whatever,

I'll go to the kitchen on my own and make my ideal leftover sandwich.

And I just... it's absolute heaven to me.

I love cold cuts.

I mean cold turkey, cold ham, I mean, what's better?

I know everyone always complains about leftovers

but for me at Christmas it's really the best part.

I like the traditional and incredibly bad for you,

fattening, unhealthy way of dealing with Christmas pud leftovers which is to slice it up cold,

tip it in sugar and fry it in butter.

Now, what do you do with the sacred rituals of Christmas dinner

if you come from a culture which has no place for turkey and all the trimmings?

I didn't really know that much about Christmas dinner,

it was something which was special and protected

and it wasn't something that we'd been invited to,

so I knew that there was something.

But the rituals of the mince pies and the turkey,

that all felt slightly mysterious and something that was in a club that I wasn't part of.

-DOORBELL RINGS

-Hi!

-Hello!

-Merry Christmas!

-Merry Christmas!

If you're Asian, there isn't just one way

to be about Christmas, and my family totally ignored Christmas.

But my best friend who was Sikh and still is Sikh,

he absolutely loved Christmas and during the whole of the time

during sixth form and college when I was there, he took it upon

himself to be in charge of the turkey and he would give me stories about how

the turkey was going to be huge and he was going to cook it

and I always felt strange because I thought, why are you so embracing Christmas? You're a Sikh!

Is the food ready?

In today's Britain, the relationship between old and new is one of give and take.

This is what Christmas is all about - sprouts!

Christmas dinner is being spiced up by our rainbow nation.

I have friends now for whom Christmas is something which they blend.

They say, "We'll have a halal turkey, we'll have samosas as well as Brussels sprouts

"and we'll put a bit of masala dip on the Brussels sprouts."

So there are different ways, I think, to mix the two now in terms

of Christmas and the culture you come from.

Despite our love of tradition, we've always embraced new influences on our national cuisine.

Talking from a food point of view, as an island we've always been

very, very open to change and the new.

As an island with an empire and even before, being invaded a couple of times, we have actually always

been good at taking on the new and refashioning it for the society that we've been living in.

But sometimes in this "conversation" some things get lost in translation.

It's only in the last few years I've found out mince pies don't have mince.

Because if you never eat them, if you never really are offered that...

I remember we were going somewhere and someone asked if I wanted one.

I said, "If it's not halal, I can't." And they said there isn't really any mince in them,

and it made me feel like an idiot.

But why would you know that unless you'd had a chance to eat them?

Now other ways of tasting the world have created a revolution in the way we experience Christmas dinner.

More people are starting to turn down turkey for Christmas dinner.

They're Britain's vegetarians and for them, the alternative Christmas meal can be very different.

On Christmas Day, two million people will be sitting down,

not to turkey and all the trimmings, but vegetarian delicacies like this cashew nut and mushroom roast.

The first couple of years that I was in university, we had Christmas dinner

with the people I was living in the house with.

Luckily, there were a couple of vegetarians.

If you're a Muslim, you can't eat meat that's not halal,

so you become a de facto vegetarian and we had this nut roast.

How do vegetarians get their protein at Christmas? Nigel.

We asked the Vegetarian Society to cook us a Christmas dinner and they produced this.

It's a nut roast with vegetables.

The cost for six people is £2.

Protein is provided by combining eggs, breadcrumbs and chestnuts.

You're dipping into that, what do you think?

I find it a dull taste, but I'm sure it's the sort of taste

that you could actually get to like.

A nut roast seemed like a contradiction in terms,

it doesn't seem Christmassy to me.

It felt like a bargain-basement compromise, but at the same time I was sitting around

a bunch of people and we could all be part of something.

Yet, there are those that can't help feeling that making the dinner table

a meat-free zone just isn't Christmas.

Vegetarians and vegans have a really serious problem at Christmas.

Not what they eat, but the theatre of how it's presented.

The real trouble is that no matter how you prepare it,

no matter how you slice it, even if you make it of brazil nuts,

a nut roast is not a great big roast bird.

The whole point of the meal is the ritual and the theatricality of it

and that, sadly, is something that vegetarians have chosen to forgo.

Some feel too much choice at the table challenges the very essence of Christmas.

One now feels absolutely obliged to find out

what dietary peculiarities are going to come into the house.

Everyone's got an allergy, everyone has got some sort of fad.

It does make the idea of ritual much more difficult because

a feast is about sharing and everyone is eating the same thing.

Mind you, gluttony of the old school does have its uses.

Having someone collapse on Christmas Day could ruin the day but it could

also make the day, especially if it's a very unpopular person.

SNORING

-Got your Christmas tree.

-Thank you.

-Is that one all right?

-Yes, super.

# God bless you, merry gentlemen... #

The sights, smells, sounds of Christmas dinner, surely they've been around since Adam and Eve

swapped fig leaves for mistletoe and stuffed the first turkey.

It was the Victorians who established the form and ideas and sort of content even of the Christmas

that WE now celebrate by taking over some of the traditions from Germany of trees

and the pagan custom of bringing green stuff into the house.

And it was Prince Albert who, having wooed Queen Victoria with his Germanic

good looks and shiny baubles, came to symbolise the strong paterfamilias at the festive table.

In the mid-1840s, the Illustrated London News prints a picture of Prince Albert

and Queen Victoria and the beginning of their huge brood

clustered around the Christmas tree.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

are the kind of middle-class family par excellence

and there's a huge appetite for knowing what goes on

in the Windsor Castle nursery, massive appetite for knowing what a family life should be like.

Royal Vic and Albert made the Christmas meal a truly family affair.

The notion of holiday and family and eating and presents,

all kind of codified around Victoria and Albert's great family Christmas idea

and it's also, isn't it, when the whole cult of domesticity really takes off

in Britain, and suburbs are growing and the Englishman's home is his castle?

Suddenly, people have to travel to be with each other at Christmas, so it becomes special.

You've also got that very ordinary thing like new lithographic processes and a penny post,

which means from the mid-1840s it's cheap to send Christmas cards and, of course, those visual images

that are on the Christmas cards, we wouldn't necessarily recognise them.

It's not robins and snowmen, often it's kind of idealised family groupings.

So, again, you get a sense of people are thinking themselves

into the ideal nuclear Christmas family.

As the Victorian middle classes gathered around their Christmas trees, swapping cards

and singing carols, it took the greatest writer of the period

to introduce the sentiment that the poor also deserved a slap-up meal.

For Dickens, Christmas dinner was a powerful metaphor highlighting poverty at the time.

Dickens had an idea of the symbolic importance of Christmas

and that Christmas above all

was the time of year when NOBODY must go without.

CHILDREN CHEER

"There never was such a goose.

"Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked.

"Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration.

"Eked out by the apple sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family.

"Indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight -

"surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish -

"they hadn't ate it all at last.

"Yet everyone had had enough and the youngest Cratchits

"in particular were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows."

I've eaten too much!

And even now we haven't eaten it all!

What he's talking about is, think what happens at Christmas time

to the great, great number of people who are in want,

who are just one meal away from the workhouse.

Thank you!

The Cratchits are Dickens' ideal members of society.

-Goodbye, my darling!

-Goodbye, father!

In a sense because they make the best of what they have.

But it's pathetic what they have and he admires them intensely

for insisting on the importance of Christmas,

the importance of the celebration, of the feast.

The other key Victorian influence on a Great British Christmas dinner was her again, yes,

the Nigella of her day, Mrs Beeton, whose book of household management was a bestseller.

Dickens had made Christmas a family occasion in A Christmas Carol.

What Mrs Beeton does is extend that, so she harnesses the Christmas meal

to ideas of Britishness and ideas of the colony as well.

So she makes the Christmas dinner,

as it were, the focus point for a whole load of ideas about

what Britishness means, what the colony means.

So, let's get this straight.

We are sitting down to a pagan custom which had a Germanic makeover

before being transformed into a meal that united a nation.

Simple, really.

What it really points to is kind of Victorian genius for thinking up

things which will just go on and on and on and on.

Like our railways, bridges and sewers, Christmas dinner seems to be another Victorian creation

that will outlast us all.

At Christmas, we can't move for TV chefs and celebrity cooks

all plying their trade, inspiring us and exasperating us in equal measure.

Christmas is here and what does it bring?

Apart from all those family and friends that are going to charge down

to see you on Christmas Day,

it brings that main cooking event of the year.

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

As a variant on the ordinary Christmas pudding, I thought it would be a nice treat for the boys

to make a Christmas pudding ice-cream.

For TV chefs, Christmas dinner is a hardy perennial,

coming up every year in need of a fresh pruning.

It's the only time when all our mates come together in one place to have a boogie!

Some of us are just so boringly cynical about Christmas but I just love it. Every last twinkling light.

In the beginning, when everything was black and white,

the first lady of the studio kitchen was Marguerite Patton.

Still on hand in her ninth decade with advice about how to deal with that bird.

Take it out of the oven and pierce it there and see what happens.

If the juice that flows is pink, it's not quite ready,

so back again it goes into the oven.

The person before me on BBC television was called Philip Harben.

The founding father of TV chefs made the studio a place

for unusual cooking methods, even when it came to Christmas dinner.

He was a great experimental person.

He wanted to find new ways of doing things and on this particular Christmas,

I can see it as if it were yesterday, he's cooked a turkey in a big, white bread bin

in simmering water and I was so shocked.

"Philip," I said, "a turkey has to be brown."

"It'll be brown later on," he said, "but in doing that I'm making sure

"it's very, very tender and delicious."

The first domestic goddess of the small screen found live television a challenge.

At the end of the 1950s the BBC said, "Marguerite, we're going to have one or two French films so that we can

"introduce French cookery to the British public."

"Yes, that sounds interesting."

"But we want to do a recipe that we can export to France.

"We think your Christmas pudding will be exactly the thing to do."

Of course, Marguerite's producers wanted spectacle and drama from her.

Some things never change.

What people don't realise is the lights in television studio going back all those years

were absolutely terrific and while the flame was very good, it really didn't show on the screen very much.

"Right, Marguerite, put some more brandy on."

"Right!" Some more brandy went up.

Lit it again. "Oh, that's not good enough.

"Put some sugar on, Marguerite."

"Right!" So I put some sugar on and a bit more brandy.

We lit it.

There was a terrific whoosh and it was almost like a bomb going up.

So what the French thought of the British habit of Christmas pudding

I've never heard, but I think they must have thought we were idiots!

As black and white television gave way to colour,

there appeared a new and brash dominatrix of the television kitchen to shake things up for the nation.

Fanny Craddock.

Now when I realised that for over 20 years

I've been doing Christmas cookery on television, stage and in national newspapers,

I thought the one constructive thing I could offer

was a series of items that I've made for Christmas

and found out over the years the absolutely easiest and most delicious and successful ways of doing them.

Fanny was no-nonsense and hands-on, but some of her advice was at times a little unfortunate.

You begin the process of lubricating the dry bird.

Fanny was vehement that her kitchen was a place of tradition

where men were the enemy.

Let's draw breath, let me wipe my hands clean because I want to tackle

the thing that men infuriate me over most.

And I want to share with you how French women cope with this thing

without any interference from the male.

I'm no Women's Lib, don't think for a moment. I'm not such a clot.

For Fanny, cooking became a psycho-drama, a convenient substitute for everyday hatred.

Think of somebody you don't like but you're too well bred to say what you think of them

so you take it out on the goose.

And then I call for help...

With nervous acolytes on hand, Fanny was, for a while, the High Priestess of the TV kitchen.

Inside the base - it's all right, darling, I can reach. Then...

But how much more Fanny could we take?

May I repeat in case I haven't made my point strongly enough?

Viewers soon became beguiled by a new generation of TV chefs

showing us the way to a less histrionic Christmas dinner.

These celebrity chefs were keen to offer their own special take on Christmas dinner.

Funky ideas to breathe new life into this most traditional of meals.

And for every cook at home battling with an undercooked turkey and overboiled veg,

there was a confident and perfectly prepared TV chef on hand with generous helpings of advice.

It's pudding time and I haven't got time to show you how to make those big, rich plum puddings

and these days, you can go out and buy a really good one.

For celebrity chefs, Christmas dinner is the perfect stage.

All ready to serve!

Here's Nigella nicely HAMMING it up.

Put the ham in a pan, cover it with water, let it come to the boil

and once it boils just chuck out the water, start again.

This is my lead aroma, red wine.

I always have a sort of amount of disdain for those wine writers

who talk about, you know, the blackberry smells and the new car leather and so on, but actually,

there really is something incredibly aromatic about wine and especially when it's heated.

And...come with me.

She's going to be succulent, tasty.

Now, let's just get her out of the roasting tray.

Oh, lift her up, pop her on there,

and we'll leave her to rest for 30 minutes.

In that time, all the juices will have calmed down inside the actual breast

and in the legs and it will be really tasty.

Now a real master class, Gary on sprouts.

To save time the Brussels sprouts can be cooked in advance and then stored in the fridge until needed.

Simply peel and score the root of the sprouts to ensure even cooking.

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.

Return to the boil and cook until tender.

A medium size sprout will take between six and eight minutes.

Once cooked, drain and plunge into ice water to immediately stop the cooking process.

And the knives are out for Jamie, cooking up a storm with his mum.

Right, I'm letting these steam for a little bit just to cool down a touch

and because I'm strange, the winglets here you can leave on and the little knuckles here

you can leave on, but they annoy me, so personally, I lose them because they annoy me.

So do you usually cook when you come home?

Do I usually cook? Um, yeah.

-No!

-No, I don't. But...no.

No, he doesn't. No, he likes to come home and be looked after.

Mum looks after me. I am a true mummy's boy.

I love the way these look like rather squished teddy bears' noses

and I take a perverse pleasure now in massacring them.

The hype and glamour that TV chefs bring to Christmas dinner is just

part of a bigger feast that's really more about Mammon than gammon.

Happy Christmas!

Christmas has become, obviously, a big commercial opportunity.

Christmas dinner is something which millions of people know about,

they share and they enjoy and so, obviously,

everyone's going to want to have a part of it, so every chef going

is going to want to have their spin on the Christmas recipe.

As we stock up to fill the fridge and freezer to bursting, there in the aisles are posters and effigies

of our favourite chefs, telling us exactly what to buy to make it all a very merry and monied Christmas.

I think in a way I can sort of see why they're doing it

because what they're saying is they know there is

a sitting market there, they know people will spend money

and they want to know what Gordon or Jamie are going to be doing for Christmas.

Even the most assertive of TV chefs scrubs up,

puts on a woolly and gets all soft-focused at Christmas.

I spent many years eating Christmas pudding because Mum said it was very traditional

and now that I've grown up and got my own kitchen, I've come up with an exciting alternative.

Now that's the sort of boy who could sit next to Gran.

As food critics watch cooks and cookery shows take over the schedules,

the mood runs from resigned to sceptical.

One of the cheapest things in the world to do is a cookery programme

and so there's more and more television about food

and it's very entertaining and people are interested in it.

I think it's a spectator sport.

I don't think many people actually cook from the books

that are published.

I don't think many people

are actually inspired to cook from the television thing.

I think people watch these programmes as a form of escapist entertainment,

and if anybody learns about a new dish, they're far more likely

to order it in a restaurant than they are to attempt it at home.

Cooking has been turned into a form of light entertainment on TV.

Famously, the more chefs you have on the telly, the fewer people cook because they're bewitched by

who the person is.

Sage and onion stuffing.

But are cooks on the box guilty of over-complicating a meal that's really just meat and two veg?

A recent cookery series ironically suggests we've had enough, we want to go back to basics.

Well, I found that programme very interesting because we got

four top chefs, who had won the first series of the Great British Menu,

to cook their favourite Christmas dinner, and they all cooked traditional food.

All of them except Richard Corrigan had a very sophisticated

restaurateur's kind of take on it and the public had to vote on them.

The one chef who just did what you'd do at home was Richard Corrigan

and that's what the public overwhelmingly voted for.

There's a new sort of feeling about cookery I think which is going,

it seems to me on television and in books, it seems to me slightly moving

away from glitzy TV chef kind of recipes that are frankly far too tricksy for most people

to be bothered to make and all about showing off and everything being perfect.

There is a real movement towards, and it's like sourcing your own food and knowing where it comes from,

towards simplicity.

Christmas dinner. Surely the one time that we are one nation under the mistletoe.

The Christmas menu is, in its bare bones, classless

because it's simply a first course, a big bird and a pudding.

But on Christmas Day, are we equal or are some of us more equal than others?

On Christmas Day, more people are eating notionally the same thing

than they are at any other time of the year.

CHEERING

They are partaking of the same communion, it's just that in one church

they have good oatcakes and in another they've got wafers which stick to your mouth.

Your bird really is a question of class.

At first it was just enough that the poor thing ran wild and free.

While you can buy a 14-pound frozen imported bird for £7, one of these will cost you around £45.

I think they're happy and it's a fantastic way to rear turkeys, but -

and they agree with me - but it is an expensive way to rear turkeys.

If all the turkeys that are consumed over Christmas were reared like this, we'd need an area

the whole of Yorkshire to do it, which isn't possible.

But now, can you hear that?

It's the sound of the organic middle classes on the march.

The rise in organics and small farmers and farmers' markets

will gradually, I hope, become a much more universal thing.

More people will realise that food is not threatening, that's it's easy to learn to cook

simple things and that the nicest thing you can possibly do

is get your friends and family round and cook for them.

The organic movement does allow

middle class people to differentiate themselves

more...acutely from people

who haven't got the same level of education,

the same level of taste.

There sort of is a drive by middle class people,

who are into food, to make it more special.

And partly that's to do with just being snobbish

and partly it's to do with taste.

I'm all for, if you like, the idea of really knowing where your food comes from and possibly paying

a little bit more for it and honouring it more and treating it better and throwing less away.

But, of course, it is a class thing in the way that food has always been

or it's certainly an income thing.

That if you have the resources, then you can make the choice.

But is all this angst killing the spirit of Christmas?

Are we losing our humour in the search for culinary perfection?

What we should be mostly concerned about is nutritious fresh food

and it would be good if it came not from too far away because of the sustainability and food miles,

it would be good if it can support local farmers, but it's not sinful to buy a carrot from Tesco.

The more of, you know about where this came from and what's gone into it

and what it was eating in August, they sort of fetishise the items that you're going to eat.

I'd hate to get to the stage where people are going to have shaken the hand of the uncle of the man,

that grew the turkey. It's going to be that bad.

That's the difficulty - that food has to do with fashion and class in Britain.

It's time for the cake's unveiling. But more important,

its crowning.

When you see this, you realise there really is no turning back now.

No Christmas dinner would be complete without a good desert.

Whether it's the big daddy, the Christmas pud, a slice or two of cake or the glorious trifle,

something sweet is the only way to complete the festive meal.

We've been mad about puddings for years.

A sweet tooth is something of a great British tradition.

Christmas pudding divides the world, rather like Marmite, into those who love it and those who don't.

Puddings and sweets have always been important.

In Elizabethan times, the sweetmeat or what was called banquet course

at Christmas was the moment in which the lady of the house could show off her skills in making delicacies.

It goes way back into the Middle Ages.

That extraordinary and actually rather north African combination of meat, but we don't put meat into it

any more, but spices with sugar, with meat, with suet.

By the 18th century, a great deal of patriotic pride surrounded our puddings.

Not for us, the fancy creations from across the Channel. No, thank you!

We demanded that ours were simply boiled and steamed.

No frills, please, we're British!

Boiled puddings are quintessentially British. They don't really appear in the same way in other European

culinary traditions, so it's not just about something

that we've eaten for hundreds of years, it's also something which is the backbone of Britain.

There was culinary patriotism involved in Christmas.

We felt that we did it better than anyone and we probably did.

Puddings became a tool of propaganda, a device to thumb our noses to a world

that scoffed at our culinary ways.

If you think of any Hogarth or Rollinson or any great engraving

from the 18th century, there are these steaming cannonballs of puddings and, in fact, British people

in Hogarth start to look like puddings

with their great stomachs and bulging buttocks and expanding waist.

The pudding said something staunchly about middle class solidarity.

In this time of empire, patriotic pudding fever reached its boiling point.

With a quarter of the globe turned pink,

the world itself resembled the great British pudding,

ripe and ready to be consumed for the national good.

Writers and artists drove the message home, emphasising the importance of pudding

as a national dish, something which could unite Britain and beyond.

Mrs Beeton isn't the first person at all to suggest that puddings

or cakes are important at Christmas, but what she does is codify that.

She's got three or four recipes for Christmas pudding.

She's got a plain Christmas pudding in case you're feeling the pinch

and she's got a Christmas pudding, "very good", in case you're feeling optimistic.

So within this very capacious book, there's different Christmas puddings

for the kind of person you are.

And for Charles Dickens, the serving of pudding was the final act in a glorious Victorian melodrama.

"Hello, a great deal of steam.

"The pudding was out of the copper.

"A smell like washing day, that was the cloth.

"A smell like an eating house and a pastry cook's next door

"to each other with a laundress's next door to that. That was the pudding."

Put the candles out!

It's a beautiful, beautiful pudding.

"In half a minute, Mrs Cratchit entered.

"Flushed but smiling proudly with the pudding like a speckled cannonball, so hard and firm,

"blazing in half and half a quart of ignited brandy and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

"Oh, a wonderful pudding!"

In this imperial age, every aspect of the nation could exemplify its power, even its Christmas pudding.

We, of course, you know, at the height of our imperial

arrogance did decide that nobody could make a pudding except for us.

So iconic was the Christmas pudding that it was used in wartime to boost morale.

It was almost as if however bad Christmas is going to be, however wet

your boots, however filthy the death around you is, a Christmas pudding will link you back to your family.

It will also be the taste of home.

And if pudding played its part on the front line,

to folks back home it served an equally important role keeping spirits high.

The ministry was so sensible.

They didn't say you can't have Christmas pudding because there's a war on.

They said, "Here you are, here is a Christmas pudding."

When you cooked them and they were black and looking rich, we all enjoyed them very much indeed.

The food we made was good.

It was plain, it had to be because we hadn't the fat or the sugar or anything else

but it was very, very edible.

After the war ended and rationing finally gave way to proper shopping in 1954,

Christmas pudding was back to its blazing former glory.

You never ate it so good.

I made in the BBC a Christmas cake, a proper Christmas cake,

a proper Christmas pudding, proper mincemeat and beautiful mince pies.

I was so pleased with myself!

And the viewers wrote in, they had to put a caravan outside to deal with all the requests for the recipes.

Into a time of plenty, we have kept up with this old friend, loath ever to be parted.

In the Britain of today, over ten million Christmas puddings are sold in the shops every year.

-Shall we see who's got the most then?

-Mm.

Find any?

No, nothing yet.

Let's see how lucky I am then.

Tastes really lovely, you can afford it and Dad likes it.

-Any other reasons?

-I've always bought their mincemeats.

-Ah.

-Everybody does, you know, love.

..As much a part of Christmas as Robertson's mincemeat.

So, a few top tips from our experts.

My Christmas pudding is a relatively simple one and traditional one going back over the generations.

Flour, not much flour, and breadcrumbs.

Mine's very moist.

Mashed banana goes in mine. There'll be people who are horrified.

And a whole grated apple, and I soak all the fruit in Theakston's Old Peculiar

for 24 hours before I mix it.

I use melted butter now rather than suet. I like it better.

Everybody should do Christmas pudding.

The most difficult thing is getting the stuff. You just mix it.

-All aboard!

-Chocks away! Cheers!

-Cheers, darling, happy Christmas!

Christmas dinner is not only a big meal, it's a story of big numbers and serious money.

Did you know we consume 19,000 tonnes of turkey each Christmas?

We spend £42 million just on puddings.

We eat 175 million mince pies.

And we consume, on average,

a gut-busting 7,000 calories eating Christmas dinner alone.

Faced with all this, might we want to take the strain out of the big feast?

In a society where convenience is more valued that tradition itself,

are we prepared any longer to put in the hours for our Christmas dinners?

Are we about to toy with the kind of microwaved Christmas imagined by novelist Tim Lott?

"Maureen regards the microwave anxiously.

"It all seems perfectly straightforward. Too straightforward.

"Tentatively, she rotates the circular plastic knob and it begins emitting a soft hum.

"Perhaps it will be OK.

"Charlie enters the dining room carrying the anaemic-looking bird.

"He sets it in the middle of the table."

In all the recent concern about food safety, a lot of attention has been

focused on microwave ovens. Are they safe?

"For the slicing, he has an electric carving knife that does much to drown out further conversation.

"Charlie feels confident about the bird despite its appearance.

"They have followed the instructions exactly.

"Robert takes a bite of the turkey first.

"His expression freezes."

But the problem is they can also leave cold spots.

"The strange thing is that alongside the heat there is cold.

"It is both cooked and uncooked.

" 'It's horrible,' mutters Maureen."

LOUD EXPLOSION

I remember my mother saying, "Do you think we'd actually manage to put it in

"the microwave this Christmas and I won't have to get up at four to cook it?"

But she never did. I think we all wanted it to be brown on the top

and by then we all knew that a microwave was unlikely to do that.

In this disposable, throwaway world, might we want our turkey delivered in a packet ready to go?

I'm terrified that it'll get to the stage

where you don't even actually have to know how to cook a turkey or even a chicken.

Everybody will get their portion, you just heat it in the microwave.

I think that would be absolutely awful.

I think it would take a lot to make me buy a ready Christmas dinner

in a foil pack, but I see there's a point for them.

If you live alone and you have no family and you want to treat yourself,

you're not going to go out and buy a turkey and roast it.

And if you buy a good ready meal, I'm sure it will be delicious.

Christmas dinner has come a long way since the Victorians first served it up.

But our world is not one of Victorian values.

Divorce rates are rising and we're all leading more separate lives.

The idea of the family now is so different.

So the idea of the nuclear family, the kind I come from...

I think one in three people now lives alone.

There's nothing more sad than somebody having Christmas dinner

on their own in front of a telly watching old Only Fools And Horses or whatever.

Blimey. Even he's had enough!

I think it would be very regrettable if Christmas lunch were to disappear.

It's communal, it's collective,

it's a feast, it's a...fete.

Fabulous!

I would say that this is the British trying to pretend that society isn't breaking up.

That we still have a community, that we still all love each other,

we want to be together, and we're desperately trying to hold onto that against all the pressures

that blow us apart.

So maybe because of who we are now,

what we have lost,

the way we live and eat every other day of the year,

perhaps because of this,

we cherish the tradition of the great British Christmas dinner that much more.

Christmas dinner will be the only vestige remaining

of trad English cooking.

You think it's been around forever and when people get to know that it wasn't...

I wouldn't tell people because I'd rather they thought it had always been there

and they had to keep doing it because I'd hate people to stop cooking it,

but I think it will go on, actually.

I can't see this, I can't see this ending.