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Dreaming of a White Christmas
Being Australian, I know all about the classic British Christmas dinner. After all, I've been eating it all my life. It doesn't make sense in the middle of a long, hot Australian summer to sit down to a huge roasted turkey, hot vegetables, stuffing and plum pudding, but we do it anyway, because no matter how republican we might be in our brains, it hasn't quite filtered down to our stomachs.
By Boxing Day, we revert to our normal summery selves, and are busy chilling bottles of sauvignon blanc and making cold turkey sandwiches to take to the beach, with huge wedges of watermelon and bags of fresh cherries.
So it's nice for me to enjoy the great British Christmas dinner in the environment it fully deserves: on a day cold enough for your cheeks to freeze; the sort of day that demands you stuff yourself with wonderful food, drink too much, and sleep it all off later.
It is, after all, a truly seasonal winter meal, with all the ingredients in their prime. I laughed my head off when I first saw a Brussels sprouts 'tree' at a farmers' market here, looking for all the world like an edible lagerphone from Australia ( a musical instrument made by nailing beer bottle caps onto a pole, very popular with what we call bush bands).
In Oz, the turkeys are good but frozen, the chestnuts canned, and the sprouts - well, let's just say that there is now another entire nation in the world who loathes them. We really should celebrate Christmas in the cold of July.
Now, however, I quite like my English Christmas Day kitchen steaming up with bubbling pots and roaring ovens, instead of running screaming from it.
I also appreciate some of the older breeds of turkey that are coming back into favour, such as the Kelly Bronze, a turkey much closer to its original Central American ancestors than we've seen for a long time, a hybrid between the Cambridge and Norfolk turkeys. These big-breasted birds are reared slowly and organically in free range conditions, and killed at 25 weeks - often twice as long as the commercial bird - and hung for two or three weeks.
(UK suppliers of Bronzes: Swaddles Green Farm (01460 234387), Kelly Turkeys (01245 223581) and Piper's Farm (01392 881380).
Even plum pudding makes sense for the first time in my life - although the best part of Christmas Day is sitting around for hours with a bottle of Burgundy, watching a ripe wheel of Vacherin Mont D'Or from the mountainous Haut-Doubs region of France try to ooze its way out of its band of spruce and off the table and onto the floor.
Fresh cranberries, too, are a revelation, taking only minutes to be transformed into a stunning, jellied relish; and clementines are my new addiction.
Last Christmas in one of my monthly broadcasts with Sally Loane on ABC Radio in Sydney, she quizzed me as to what Christmas recipes I would be providing for my British audience in The Times. Thai turkey and lemongrass curry? Fresh oysters with tomato and basil salsa? Sweet chilli prawns? Er, no. Classic roast turkey, prune and chestnut stuffing, and gravy. The funny thing was the station was then inundated with requests from Australian listeners for the traditional recipes I had mentioned. Old habits die hard.
For my classic Christmas dinner recipes, click here
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