Oh Come All Ye Tasteful: The Foodie's Guide to a Millionaire's Christmas Feast

by Ian Flitcroft

Overview

'Well written and incredibly descriptive, the author has clearly done homework about the field of gastronomy to produce a wonderful and memorable read.' —Publishers Weekly

'This is the perfect little gift for the gourmet in your life, the classy cook in the kitchen or the millionaire (in his or her own mind) who just wants to impress.' —The Fine Times Recorder

'What's that you say? A turkey is a turkey. Of course it is, but that dry over-cooked bird will soar when stuffed with pigeon breast, foie gras, black truffles and a few ortolan…'

This book will help you create a quirky Christmas dinner that is so wildly impressive that even the most curmudgeonly great aunt or begrudging mother-in-law will swoon.

Why let the millionaires be restricted to shortbread? From a morning Myrrhtini, to an after dinner 1918 vintage Armagnac this will be a feast that no one will forget.

Grab your apron, put on your chef's hat and let the games commence!

Makes the perfect humorous stocking filler for the home cook looking to impress at Christmas!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910266328
Publisher:	Legend Press
Publication date:	12/01/2018
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ian Flitcroft is the author of The Reluctant Cannibals, which was shortlisted for the Amazon Breakthrough Award. He is also a long term member of the Slow Food Movement in Ireland, a collector of old culinary-related books, and an avid cook and wine collector.

Read an Excerpt

Oh Come All Ye Tasteful

The Foodie's Guide to a Millionaire's Christmas Feast

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By Ian Flitcroft

Legend Times Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Ian Flitcroft
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-910266-32-8

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CHAPTER 1

The Perfect Christmas Lunch

What makes for a perfect Christmas lunch? There may be quite a few of you who think that tradition is the most important ingredient. To counter that let me just say that tradition, like socks, can wear thin; especially if you receive them as gifts every year. So I'll concede tradition is important, but it's not the most important aspect of this meal. To transform your Christmas dining you need to let go of a few of your treasured traditions. This book will show you how to replace your boiled-to-death, once-a-year sprouts with gastronomic traditions from the past that are worth bringing back, and new ideas from the present, so all your future Christmases will be bright and merry. Did you spot the Dickens reference there? I do hope so, because there are several Dickensian-era traditions in this book that will help to get your Christmas off to a fine start.

Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam ... Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

What are the other ingredients of the perfect Christmas lunch? Top of the list has to be extravagance. This isn't just a meal, it is a feast; the nearest most of us will ever get to that Henry the Eighth-style banquet with roast swans on silver platters and Irish wolfhounds slouching around waiting for a half-chewed leg of lamb to be thrown over someone's shoulder. This feasting heritage goes all the way back to the pagan festivals of the winter solstice such as the Roman Saturnalia. This Roman holiday started on December 17th and ran until December 23rd when gifts were given. Sound familiar? While we may not share the Roman fondness for fried dormice and nightingales' tongues, there is no doubt that some Christmas traditions are decidedly unchristian.

* * *

Next on my list comes taste. Christmas fare should excite the palate and leave your taste buds jangling. Much as we all love Christmas lunch, the sense of occasion usually beats the taste. When was the last time you had a truly amazing gustatory experience at Christmas? This is a tragedy and one which this book will help to solve. As well as taste, Christmas lunch must also be a feast for the eyes. Those roast potatoes should sparkle. The turkey (or other fowl) should have the perfect hue and the table should be hidden under platefuls of every imaginable colour. The burning flames of brandy on the Christmas pudding should be dramatic (I'll explain a neat trick for that), not the usual anaemic blue that is almost invisible even with the lights out. Our eyes, along with our noses, are indeed another part of our sense of taste and are essential to capture the sense of theatre from a great meal.

After taste I would put novelty on the list of essential ingredients, though it is one that is often in short supply. Imagine if, every year, all the presents under the tree were the same. The first year would, of course, be fine. The second year the whole present concept would be beginning to lose its shine and five years later you'd all be sick of seeing the same random collection of golf gadgets, books and bath salts. So why should you do that with Christmas food? Wouldn't a few novel flavours and dishes spice up the whole affair? Of course it would. Even if you are determined to stick with turkey, you can liven up that old culinary chestnut with some spectacular additions.

* * *

Surprise is novelty's twin sister, but they are not identical twins. Novelty in food is usually something that you can see. A truly surprising food catches you off-guard. You might be expecting something entirely different, tricked by your eyes. Or the taste alone might be enough. We are often left to rely on Christmas crackers to provide both novelties and surprises (as well as dire jokes), but why not throw a few surprises onto the menu? Another twist that can spice up a Christmas lunch is devilment. Depending on your guest list and your own sense of humour you might consider playing a few tricks on your guests by serving up some really unusual treats – like chocolate-covered Brussels sprouts with the coffee!

* * *

As a small, and rather more serious aside, let us not forget charity as the last important ingredient of our Christmas celebrations. Most of us are blessed with never having to ever experience true hunger. Let me make a suggestion. I'm sure you've come across the notion of off-setting your carbon emissions by donating to schemes where a tree is planted to assuage your guilt about catching a plane halfway across the world. But consider that as well as a carbon footprint, we also have a calorie footprint. If each of us set off the calories we consumed at Christmas and donated enough money for a similar amount of calories to be delivered to those around the world who truly need them, we would be making a small but valuable contribution to those in greatest need.

* * *

Don't be alarmed that everything in this book will be hard to make. The ingredients may be unusual, difficult to find and (at times) wildly expensive but the preparation is simple enough. Christmas is too short a day to spend it in the kitchen. I, like you, am a food enthusiast not a professional chef. To mangle a line from T.S. Eliot, "No! I am not Prince Heston, nor was meant to be". But now, as the Roman emperors used to say in the Colosseum,

CHAPTER 2

Aperitifs, Cocktails & Wines

"Wine is bottled poetry.

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters, 1884

Christmas and drinking go together like holly and ivy. Many of us, excepting the noble tribe of abstainers, will have over-indulged in all manner of alcoholic beverages at this time of year and suffered the consequences. So taking inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson's book, I suggest that it is time to rethink your approach to alcohol.

Every true foodie should lean towards a gastronomical rather than a gluttonous approach to drink. This means that rather than drinking a firkin of the same boring beer or supermarket wine, you should devote as much thought and consideration to what you drink as you do to what you eat. As well as adding surprising new tastes and novel twists, the bibulous aspects of Christmas are an area where you can display your extravagance to its greatest advantage. There are practical limits on how much you can spend on food at Christmas, but when it comes to spirits and wine you can easily sip your way through a king's ransom if you want to. If through some misfortune, entirely not of your making, you find yourself lacking the financial resources of a Russian oligarch, don't fret. There are plenty of ways of making a splash when it comes to Christmas drinks without having to fill your swimming pool with champagne and jumping in.

Aperitifs

Champagne is the definitive Christmas aperitif. It has an associated glamour that no other wine can match, despite its humble origins.

There was a time 800 years ago when the Champagne region was known more for its wool than its wine. To encourage people to buy their produce, merchants started giving out the flat, pinky-brown wine for free with every purchase of wool. It didn't start to become the drink we know today until a dedicated monk by the name of Dom Pierre Perignon, abbot of a Benedictine Abbey in Hautvillers, worked out in 1670 how to make a pure white wine from the red pinot grapes usually used in Champagne production. Back then the characteristic bubbles of champagne were thought to be a sign of a bad wine, but King Louis XIV and later his nephew Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, developed a taste for bubbles and introduced sparkling champagne into French high society. The rest is, of course, history.

Three Champagnes that should impress your guests (if not your accountant)

This champagne has the greatest bling factor, and is now inextricably linked with hip-hop. It is satisfyingly expensive (around £150 a bottle for the 2002, one of the best vintages of recent years) and epitomises the very newest of the nouveau riche. It is undoubtedly a very fine champagne, but I confess I wasn't totally blown away when I tried it. So why on earth serve it at Christmas? Well if Puff Daddy or Jay-Z are gathering around your table, it would be almost rude to serve anything else.

If you thought the Cristal was a touch pricey, then this little beauty might take you by surprise. The bottle, as you might guess from its name, is graced by an engraving of a quail in a flowering tree. What you might not guess is that it is also graced by a price tag of around £1000. Depending on your desire to impress, you might be tempted to leave the price tag on this one.

One of this champagne's claims to fame is that while the world's financial system was starting to grind to a halt during 2008, the value of a bottle of this champagne shot up from £900 to over £1300. It is clearly the first choice of those fortunate few who, when the banks crash, can just sigh languidly and reach for the Krug.

As expensive as the previous champagnes might be, they are mere drops in the ocean compared to the prices that have been paid recently for bottles of vintage champagne recovered from shipwrecks.

A few years ago a shipment of champagne was recovered from a schooner that sank off the Finnish archipelago of Åland. The boat sank sometime around 1830 and 162 bottles of champagne from the finest producers were recovered from the wreck. They were opened to see if they were drinkable and the seventy-nine bottles that passed the test were recorked for sale. While champagne can last a surprisingly long time in the bottle, this haul was undoubtedly helped by the cool dark conditions at the bottom of the sea. A year later in 2011, a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne from this wreck was sold for a world record price of &8364;30,000 (£26,700 at the exchange rate at the time).

The bottles from this shipwreck certainly looked a little rough too, so an alternative and cheaper ploy might be to cellar your champagne in the bottom of the garden pond for a year and spin a mighty yarn about its watery origins when Christmas comes around again.

Mulled Wine - Smoking Bishop

While not quite an aperitif, mulled wine is a perfect start to any Christmas celebration, at any time of day or night.

Talking of which, I am old enough to remember a time when mulling wine still involved some effort and the use of some real ingredients. These days your local supermarket will provide a very decent screw top offering that can be poured straight into a saucepan or even microwaved in the glass (quelle horreur).

Even if embellished with a slice of orange these commercial offerings sum up everything that is wrong with a modern Christmas – too much commerce, and too little care.

So let's go back to basics and start with a recipe for mulled wine that goes back to Dickens' time and before – Smoking Bishop. But be warned! It is such a good drink that you might get carried away, like the reformed Mr Scrooge, and start giving away your millions to your struggling extended family.

• 6 seville oranges

• A few dozen whole cloves (it's Christmas, life is too short to count cloves)

• Up to 1tsp each of ground cinnamon, allspice and mace. A stick of cinnamon is a perfectly acceptable addition too. Don't fret over the exact combination of spices – follow your nose!

• 1 decent-sized piece of fresh ginger root ( an inch), cut into slices

• 1 bottle (750ml) port (this needs to be ruby port and don't waste your finest vintage on this recipe)

• 1 bottle (750ml) red wine (something fresh and not too tannic. A nice Rhône Valley wine or a new world Syrah would do well)

• 100g or ½ cup sugar, or more to taste

Prick the skin of the oranges with a sharp knife and put a whole clove in each hole. Ideally they should be roasted by an open fire. Failing that, put them in a nonstick deep baking dish and stick them in the oven (150 degrees) for 1-1½ hours. They should be starting to brown with a sticky caramelised mess oozing out. Put all the spices together with a cup of the red wine and the same amount of water into a large pan and boil away for 20 minutes until reduced down and the kitchen is smelling heavenly. Then add the rest of the wine until it is heated and pour over the baked oranges, stirring to get some of the caramelized goodness dissolved. Leave this covered overnight. Next day, remove the oranges, cut in half and squeeze the juice back into the wine mixture. Strain into a fresh pan. Add the bottle of port and gently heat until it starts smoking! Taste it before adding the sugar. Too much sugar removes all the subtlety.

Christmas Cocktails

Cocktails are a relatively modern invention and hence a new addition to Christmas celebrations, but don't let that put you off. With a little imagination, and for far less cash than with champagne, you really set the festive tone alight – quite literally, in the case of one of the cocktails I have for you.

In the spirit (pun intended) of the principles I outlined in the introduction, I'd like to offer you three cocktails whose heritage can be traced back over 2,000 years to a cold night, in a barn, in Jerusalem: The Goldfinger Babe, The Frankincendiary 75 and the Myrrhtini. If three kings from the East considered that gold, frankincense and myrrh were the most suitable presents to celebrate the birth of the infant Jesus, who am I to disagree? And if, God forbid, there are any murmurings of discontent on your levels of excess you can look suitably insulted/hurt/horrified (delete as appropriate) and say that you were merely trying to bring Christmas back to its religious roots.

As well as presenting your guests with a choice of three exotic drinks, you can then enjoy gazing down from that most enjoyable viewpoint – the moral high ground.

The Goldfinger Babe

This is named after my lovely wife, Jean. Several years ago, we were sitting in a wonderful bar in China where a young cellist was playing the background music. She did this while sitting on a throne made from artificial red roses. We had to pinch ourselves to remind us that this was communist China. The cocktail menu was similarly extravagant. Jean chose a golden champagne and reclined back on our Roman emperor-style benches. When it arrived, she took her first sip and said, "just tastes like normal champagne to me". Even in the dim sultry light I could see the gold leaf glinting off her teeth. She might have just stepped off the set of the film Goldfinger, hence the name of this cocktail that is inspired by that night.

The Goldfinger Babe adds the dimension of excess with 22kt gold and adds an interesting complexity of taste (cinnamon and liquorice to name just a few) to the champagne that was missing from our adventure in China.

The only important step is to give the bottle of Goldwasser a good shake before you start; this gets all the gold foil back up into suspension. This is best served in a champagne flute because you can see the gold flakes better. Fill a quarter of the glass with Goldwasser and top up with champagne. It's that simple.

The Frankincendiary 75

• A double measure of Sacred Distillery Gin – a unique low pressure distilled gin that contains frankincense

• A single measure of lemon juice – from an actual lemon please, not one of those plastic things!

• A half measure of elderflower cordial

• Champagne

• The metal cap from a champagne bottle (plaque de muselet, to give it its proper title)

• A pair of tweezers to lift the plaque de muselet in and out of the glass

• A few grains of frankincense resin

Mix the gin, lemon juice and elderflower cordial in a cocktail mixer full of ice cubes and stir vigorously for a minute or less.

Strain the contents into a broad, coupe-style champagne glass and top up with champagne. Away from the glass place the grains of frankincense into the upturned champagne cap and get them smoking with the blow torch using a fine blue flame on a suitably non-flammable surface (not your wife's brand new walnut kitchen work surface). They will start to bubble and melt and then catch fire and release their fragrant smoke. Then lift carefully with tweezers and float on top of the drink. The perfect burning frankincense-themed cocktail. If the smoke is getting too much after the first sip, the champagne cap can be popped out onto a saucer and left to burn to give the room a true Christmas aroma.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Oh Come All Ye Tasteful by Ian Flitcroft. Copyright © 2015 Ian Flitcroft. Excerpted by permission of Legend Times Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Editorial Reviews

"Well written and incredibly descriptive, the author has clearly done homework about the field of gastronomy to produce a wonderful and memorable read."  —Publishers Weekly on The Reluctant Cannibals

From the Publisher