From The Paris Review:
These days, British and American Christmases are by and large the same hodgepodge of tradition, with relatively minor variations. This Christmas Eve, for example, when millions of American kids put out cookies and milk for Santa, children in Britain will lay out the more adult combination of mince pies and brandy for the old man many of them know as Father Christmas. For the last hundred years or so, Father Christmas has been indistinguishable from the American character of Santa Claus; two interchangeable names for the same white-bearded pensioner garbed in Coca-Cola red, delivering presents in the dead of night. But the two characters have very different roots. Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children, was given his role of nocturnal gift-giver in medieval Netherlands. Father Christmas, however, was no holy man, but a personification of Dionysian fun: dancing, eating, late-night drinking—and the subversion of societal norms.
The earliest recognizable iteration of Father Christmas probably came in 1616 when, referring to himself as “Captain Christmas,” he appeared as the main character in Ben Jonson’s Christmas, His Masque, performed at the royal court that festive season. Nattily dressed and rotund from indulgence, he embodied Christmas as an openhearted festival of feasts and frolics. But by the time he appeared on the front cover of John Taylor’s pamphlet The Vindication of Christmas, in 1652, Father Christmas had grown skinny, mournful, and lonely, depressed by the grim fate that had befallen the most magical time of year. The days of carol singing and merrymaking were over; for the past several years Christmas across Britain had been officially canceled. The island was living through a so-called Puritan Revolution, in which the most radical changes to daily life were being attempted. Even the institution of monarchy had been discarded. As a ballad of the time put it, this was “the world turned upside down.”
The prohibitions on Christmas dining would have particularly aggrieved Robert May. One of the most skilled chefs in the land, the English-born, French-trained chef cooked Christmas dinners fit for a king—a doubly unwelcome skill in a time of republicanism and puritanism. May connected the medieval traditions of English country cooking with the early innovations of urban French gastronomy, and was at the height of his powers when the Puritan Revolution took effect. During those years, he compiled The Accomplisht Cook, an English cookbook of distinction and importance that was eventually published in 1660. In more than a thousand recipes, May recorded not only the tastes and textures of a culinary tradition, but a cultural world that he feared was being obliterated—including the Christmas dinner, an evocative sensory experience that links the holiday of four centuries ago with that of today.
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The young May’s experiences abroad hint at the changes occurring in English food culture of the time, especially among the social elite. During the late Tudor and Stuart eras, numerous foodstuffs, including potatoes, tea, coffee, chocolate, and tobacco, arrived from the Americas and established themselves as staples of the national diet. The Accomplisht Cook is replete with non-English influences, giving us a vivid idea of what new fashions entered his kitchen in the early 1600s. May drew heavily from Spanish and Italian recipes, and his book includes thirty-five dishes for eggs that he took from the pioneering French chef François Pierre La Varenne. Despite this, May’s food was quintessentially English. The Accomplisht Cook laments that French chefs “have bewitcht some of the Gallants of our Nation with Epigram Dishes” in favor of the sturdy traditions of English cooking. The Englishness of May’s approach is palpable in his suggestions for Christmas dinner, dominated by roast meats and featuring a mince pie. Today’s mince pies—a Christmas institution in Britain and Ireland—are filled with a sickly-sweet concoction of dried fruit, fortified wine, mixed spices, and mounds of brown sugar, but before the Victorian era they also contained meat. May suggests numerous cuts of beef (including tongue, buttock, and intestine) or hare, turkey, and mutton, among others. In his recipes for a veal-based mince pie, he recommends mixing it with more familiar ingredients such as dates, orange peel, nutmeg, and cinnamon, flavors that are still powerfully evocative of what many of us would consider a “traditional” Christmas.
May’s bill of fare for Christmas Day is huge: forty dishes split across two courses, with additional oysters and fruit. Partly this reflects the nature of May’s experience in the service of some of the wealthiest people in the country, and partly the Stuart approach to dining. The diaries of May’s contemporary Samuel Pepys detail the meat-heavy, gut-busting dinners he hosted each year on the anniversary of his kidney stone operation (that the procedure worked and didn’t kill him was, in the seventeenth century, truly a cause for celebration).
Link to the rest at The Paris Review