The well-loved cookbook challenge #5

Christmas recipes and cookbooks

The well-loved cookbook challenge stems from a hugely popular post I wrote a few months back about treasured cookbooks - the ones that are literally falling apart. Each month I choose a theme and ask you what your favourite recipes are from books that are 10 years old or over. This month, for obvious reasons, it’s Christmas cookbooks.

I don’t know about you but my most treasured Christmas recipes are on scraps of paper - my late mother-in-law’s Christmas cake and my own Christmas pudding from a 1910 (I think) recipe both of which I’ve shared on this Substack.

There are a few books I go back to but from that early era when I was teaching myself how to cook.

The mince pies with orange pastry I still make comes from Josceline Dimbleby’s Cooking for Christmas, a book she wrote for Sainsbury’s in 1978 and which now, amazingly, fetches £36.99 on eBay. (Although there is a newer version which Waterstones is selling for a rather more affordable £9.99.)

I was delighted to see Diana Henry write that they’re the only mince pies she ever makes. You can find her recipe in the Telegraph if you can access the paywalled content. And here if you can’t.

The beef stew in cider from Arabella Boxer’s Christmas Food & Drink is another favourite - not especially Christmassy but a good antidote to too much turkey - and I still check The Penguin Freezer Cookbook for the quantities I need for my bread sauce and cranberry sauce. Remember when we used to freeze everything ahead before Christmas? Maybe you still do?

Dedicated Christmas cookbooks seem to have become more of a thing though in recent years. Now every celebrity chef and cookery writer has one, Delia, Mary, Jamie, Nigel, Nigella, The Hairy Bikers …. Maybe you’ve got at least one?

I was chatting to someone over the weekend who swears by Mary Berry’s trifle which unusually includes pears. I think this is the one. I’ve always regarded Nigella as the trifle queen myself. Her Christmas book includes a boozy British trifle which is ‘enough for 20 portions easily’.

I did rather like the idea of the lemon and lime soufflé in Rosemary Wadey’s Cooking for Christmas (above) which, bolstered by gelatine, soars proudly above the edge of its dish. A light citrussy pud is not at all a bad idea.

The best Christmas cookbook for me though, without a doubt, is Nigel Slater’s Christmas Chronicles. It doesn’t quite make the cut for this series, having been published in 2017, but has the immense virtue of offering a daily recipe starting in November and finishing - on February 2nd - with an almost summery lemon, orange and basil ice.

Scandis are exceptionally good on Christmas too. Leafing through it again I feel I should have made more use than I have of my copy of Trine Hahnemann’s Scandinavian Christmas with its recipes for Lucia bread (you’ve still got time to make those for December 13th), beetroot-horseradish cured salmon and slow cooked goose with apples and prunes.

Finally, though again it’s recent and so strictly doesn’t qualify, there’s been a lot of praise for Jane Lovett’s Get Ahead Christmas although, just two weeks before Christmas, I suspect Lovett would consider I was taking it dangerously close to the wire.

Anyway I’d love to know what you’ll be making and where you get your Christmas inspiration. The favourite recipes the family won’t let you drop or any new ones you’ve adopted over the past few years.

I confess in my case there aren’t many … Christmas is all about doing EXACTLY the same as you did last year. Or is it?

If you enjoy this well-loved cookbook series, which I hope you do, it would be great if you’d give it a like.