6 posts tagged “christmas”

The dinner has been cooked, served, and devoured, except for all the not-inconsiderable leftovers. The guests have departed. The dishes are mostly done. The cook is exhausted.

Final Menu:

English Raised Game Pie; Plum and Apple Chutney, and Oregon Red Currant Wine

Shrimp Bisque, and Oregon Hard Cider

Mustard/Sugar Glazed Ham, Buttermilk Parsley Mashed Potatoes, Green Beans, and Beaujolais Nouveau

Traditional Steamed Plum Pudding, Cranberry-Apricot Trifle, Oregon Mead, and Coffee

I won't need to cook for days...

I made the trifle this morning, with homemade cranberry jam and apricots. It needs only the whipped cream on top to be complete, which I will do in the morning. Otherwise, we spent the day in Portland up at my mom's house. We ate my brother's homemade pizza, drank a lot of wine, and critiqued the Food Network. A good time was had by all.

Mostly a holding pattern today, since I am on-call. No real cooking, just housecleaning and laundry and such. But as promised, here's a pic of the Christmas Cake, taken just prior to its premier at the Choir Party.

Today I braved the grocery store and bought (I hope) every last flippin' thing I will need for Christmas dinner. Then I spent the rest of the day cooking, pretty much. I made the "base" for the shrimp bisque, a pretty familiar recipe and nothing particularly challenging. The real project was the Game Pie.

This started with the marinated game from last night. I also bought some fresh side pork, which in the USA is what we call uncured/unsmoked bacon. They call it something else in the UK. Anyway, the fatty side pork plus 1/2 pound of the ground elk went into my food processor to be minced fine, then I added garlic and seasonings. Game is often paired with seasonings such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger; all of those went into the mix.

The pastry is made using a peculiarly English technique; water and butter (more authentically, lard) are brought to a  boil, then poured onto the dry ingredients. The resulting mixture, known as hot-water pastry, is mixed and kneaded and used to line a springform pan (with some reserved for the top). It's quite easy to work with, more like playing with Plasticine than with pastry. Then, the pan is lined with bacon and filled with alternating layers of the game mixture and the pork mixture.

The pastry lid is placed on top and sealed, with a hole in the middle for steam, and the whole works is baked for a couple of hours.

Eventually you can cool it partly, ease off the springform ring, paint it with beaten egg, and bake it some more until golden.

My pan isn't as deep as the pan that the cookbook author uses, so a lot of pork fat bubbled out onto the jelly roll pan underneath the pie. I'll save it for another use. Traditionally, as the pie insides cool and shrink, they leave a gap which is filled with a highly seasoned, jellied stock. I don't think there will be any airspace inside this pie to need filling, but if necessary, I've got the stock ready.

If you don't count the fruitcake, or the pudding that I steamed back in November, or the spongecake in the freezer (for the trifle) that I made earlier in the week, the Christmas Dinner cooking really began today.

I'll be making a traditional English raised game pie. Tonight I took a thawed pheasant (farmed in Michigan, alas, I have few friends who hunt) and removed all of the meat from the bones (froze bones and scraps for stock). I diced up the meat and added some ground elk to it along with brandy, port, thyme, salt, and pepper. This will marinate tonight and form the body of the pie. I'll put the pie together tomorrow and bake it, and we will eat it cold for a first course with chutney and local Oregon red currant wine. Pictures to follow, if the venture is successful.

Lucy, by the way, says to tell her fans that pheasant liver is delicious...

This morning, I found myself talking to a cake.

Not just any cake; this is a plutonium-dense traditional English fruitcake that I made a few days ago. It's sitting nicely on a covered cake stand, aging. As part of the aging process, I drizzle brandy over it every day. Today, I punctuated my actions with comments such as, "Let's see if you can take a little more. Oooh, did you drink that already?" I would have tied a napkin under its chin, if a Bundt-shaped cake could be said to have a chin.

This afternoon, I mixed up homemade marzipan. On Saturday, I will roll it out and cover my boozy little fruitcake-child in a creamy blanket of it, tucking it into every little Bundt-y ridge and valley. Late that night, I will mix up a batch of royal icing and smooth that on top of the marzipan, and let it dry overnight. I'll take it to the post-Lessons and Carols party, and serve it up to some of my most beloved fellow Anglophiles, topped with a sprig of holly.

Christmastide baking and cooking makes me a little goofy, every year. I always think that I am too busy, too professional for such shenanigans. I shy away from Christmas shopping or having a tree (the cats would knock it over, anyway) and I almost never bake cookies. But something in my soul is soothed by the making of traditional English Christmas dishes, and I realize anew every year that I enjoy the process as much as the end-result. Perhaps more.

I've dabbled in fruitcake starting about 11-12 years ago, with varying success. And our first Christmas in this house, I cooked a Dickensian Christmas dinner of roast goose, stuffing, potatoes, gravy, and all the trimmings (all while coming down with pneumonia... I think I had more stamina then). I've reprised the goose a couple of times and have done English roast beef as well. But my latent Anglophilism really kicked in with the pudding.

I think it was Christmas of 2002, or maybe 2003, but I'm not sure; we had either goose or roast beef, and I served trifle and steamed plum pudding for dessert. I think everyone was a little dubious about the pudding, and I admit that an unmolded plum pudding is an odd sight. I plopped it onto its plate and served everyone a little. And when my mother took a bite, she exclaimed, "Oh! Your grandmother used to make this!"

She went on to tell me about the half-remembered taste from her childhood. My grandmother, with a mother carried away by illness (influenza, perhaps? It was about the time of the Pandemic of 1918) and a father who didn't know what to do with her after that, was raised by her Aunt Julie. Aunt Julie was either English or a first-generation immigrant. Surviving photos of her show a sturdy peasant woman with strong arms, capable of kneading bread or stirring a pudding. She taught my grandmother how to make steamed puddings and fruitcakes. My mother remembers that Grandma steamed hers in a coffee can. She'd never mentioned any of this to me, at least not the culinary details.

I've made it since then, not every year (some years we have just given up in exhaustion and not hosted a Christmas dinner) but every year that I could. Mom still makes the same comments. I think that I serve it to her hoping that she will remember more stories to tell me, as if raisins and currants and rum sauce will trigger some hidden action in those lost childhood memories, before all of the family tales are forgotten. And almost every year, I make a least one fruitcake, and feed it lovingly upon brandy, and in turn feed it to those that I love.