Michael Joseph Elizabeth David's Christmas

This had an excellent review and I adore Christmas cookbooks. I was very disappointed. It's flat with recipes that are old and frankly dull. Not for me

"my reserve stores consist of plainer, less demanding dishes.." is Elizabeth David's theme and there follows many reasonably simple dishes to be eaten over the "Great Too Much" period that is Christmas. It is also. a very welcome sentiment that salads and un-christmassy fare is much appreciated.i at least love her offerings in that vein!

I spent 2 hours Sellotaping badly torn pages before I could start reading them.Otherwise, once sorted it was a good collection of Mrs David's recipes put together after her death.

This was a present but it arrived in this damaged condition. So poor

...the typical Elizabeth David way.'The celebrated food writer, who died in 1992, apparently always meant to write a book called 'Food for Christmas' and had not only collected recipes and useful quotes but written the introduction, which makes clear her preference for smoked salmon and a glass of champagne without all the commercial fuss...'Compiled by Jill Norman, the preface goes on to explain that the idea of the book was first hatched way back in the seventies...not just a book of recipes, but one which gathered all ED's Christmas material in one neat little volume.Measuring in around 22 cm x 15.5 cm x 1.75 cm, it has dark red board covers with gold lettering to the spine and is simply dressed in a dust-jacket.Inside are 214 matt pages, split over chapters:♦ Celebrating Christmas- Christmas is a family occasion- Untraditional Christmas food- Cooking for a family- Christmas preparations- Life after Christmas- A country Christmas (George Eliot)♦ First courses and cold meats♦ Soups♦ Poultry and Game- What to do with the bird♦ Meat- Traditional Christmas dishes- Christmas in France♦ Vegetables and Salads- The magpie system♦ Sauces, Pickles and Chutneys♦ Desserts, Cakes and Drinks- Plum pottage, porridge, broth and pudding- The pudding- Frumenty or fermity- Christmas drinks- Para Navidadsandwiched between an introduction and a list of other books by Elizabeth David.Jill Norman explains:'I have put it together now in the spirit which Elizabeth intended, with her introduction, the recipes and the articles that still have an interest today...the style of the recipes varies, as Elizabeth's writing changed over the years. The early recipes tend to be quite short, whereas later ones are often accompanied by explanatory notes', e.g.:From, 'Apple purée or sauce', on page 133:'Sometimes if making the purée just for myself, I leave out both sugar and butter. At one time it seems to have been customary to add mustard to apple sauce. One recipe I have, from 'Family Magazine' of 1740, directs that the sauce for a roasted chine of pork be 'made with lemon-peel, apples, sugar, butter and mustard.'This would have been one of those sweet sharp sauces, something like Italian fruit mustards, which for centuries have been associated with rich, fat meat such as pork. A chine was a cut from the back of a pig, rather like a joint of back bacon in the piece. There is a high proportion of fat on a chine, so the apple and mustard sauce was an appropriate one.'Jill continues:'Where necessary I have added metric measures and oven temperatures in Celsius. The recipes for cured meats call for saltpetre, which, unfortunately, chemists are no longer permitted to sell. The best solution is to find a friendly local butcher who pickles his own meat and ask if he will supply some. If you can't get it, you can cure the meat without it, for the purpose of saltpetre is not preservative but cosmetic: it gives the meat its appetising pink colour.'The chapters open with the title on the right hand page, the left page is blank. The recipes have a simple title at the top and, for the main part, the required ingredients are generally scattered through the writing. Recipes most often spill over onto the next page.16 full colour plates (2 sets of 8) of ingredients from Jason Lowe are the only illustrations in the book.A small taste of the other recipes included:* Prawn paste* Egg mayonnaise* Potted spice beef* Terrine of pork and duck* Pumpkin and celery soup* Pasternak and cress cream* Potage Saint Herbert* To make stock from a poultry carcass* Turkey with herb and butter stuffing* Boned turkey, stuffed with tongue and forcemeat* French sausage meat* Giblet gravy* Turkey breasts with Marsala* Salted goose* Oven-poached chicken* Duck baked in cider* Spiced beef for Christmas* Baked fillet of beef with tomato fondue* Rolled and glazed ox-tongue* Leeks with red wine* Brussels sprouts* Carottes rapées* Endive and beetroot salad* Bread sauce* Cumberland sauce* Spiced quinces* Brandy butter* Mincemeat* Atholl brose* A Christmas recipe for an Old Testament cake* Vanilla sugar* Vin chaud a l'orange