By Lindsay Middleton A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was published in 1843. Over the course of the 19th century, his depictions of the Christmas turkey and charitable spirit were reprinted thousands of times in Britain and America, cementing the fascination with and commodification of Christmas we are familiar with today. But what about the food eaten at the Victorian dinner table, beyond the (now) traditional turkey? These three recipes, which are both familiar and different to the Christmas menu we now know and love, show how Christmas foods and traditions were being explored and adapted over the course of the 19th century.
Some recipes were more extravagant than our typical modern Christmas dinner, like the Yorkshire or Christmas Pie from The Modern Cook by Charles Elme Francatelli (1846), which featured five different birds (pheasant, partridge, woodcock, snipe and grouse), bacon, tongue and French truffles. Here are three slightly less complicated offerings to try at home. From The Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton (1861) English writer Isabella Beeton’s soup essentially involved simmering the bones and leftover meat of your Christmas turkey into an existing stock to enrich it, before using a thickening agent to make it even richer.
Her reference to Harvey’s Sauce demonstrates how common it was to buy branded, mass-produced foodstuffs by this point in the 19th century. A thin, strong-tasting ketchup flavoured with anchovies, garlic and cayenne, the.