BEGINNING with a oversized dry turkey, Christmas is a catalogue of foodstuffs avoided every other day of the year. And yet you gorged on all these:
Turkey
Popularised by gluttonous, murderous, low-sperm-count monster King Henry VIII, cooking a vast bird nobody enjoys is as sensible an idea as marrying him. It weighs too much to be bothered getting it out to baste it, so you will never have a drier meal. Termites would complain it was too dry.
Bread sauce
Once Britons were so poor they made sauces out of stale crusts. Today we have so many sauces Ed Sheeran can launch his own range and is barely even hated for it. Fannying around with recipes created in between bubonic plague outbreaks is unnecessary.
Nut roast
In 1980, baking a nut roast for your hippy weirdo vegetarian friends was the height of sophistication. Today, a beetroot and squash wellington from M&S or lab-grown meat-free turkey substitutes both taste much nicer than the monstrosity you have created out of mixed nuts, lentils and resentment.
Brussels sprouts
Became a Christmas staple toward the end of the 1800s, when we were also widely enthusiastic about hanging and colonial violence. We’ve given up those but can’t let go of the worst one. They cannot, perhaps uniquely, be made palatable even teamed with bacon. Get asparagus and stop being a twat.
Christmas pudding
Originated from a medieval nightmare called frumenty, which included mutton, currents, prunes, eggs and beer. Even without all that shit it’s chore to both cook and eat, however excited your dad gets about soaking it in brandy and setting it on fire. Burn it, let it burn, have a tiramisu instead.
Quality Street
Every major town and city in the UK has a branch of Hotel Chocolat, unless they’re as horrible as Stoke-on-Trent. You can buy Guylian Belgian sea shells in Lidl. And yet we still buy tubs of these Thatcher-era sweetmeats. They’ve even f**ked up the shiny wrappers by making them out of eco-friendly vegetable wax, which the chocolates might as well be.
