Status Updates From Elizabeth David's Christmas

returning to shelf until next christmas.

I do not willingly cook or eat bread sauce, but recognise that there are still many people to whom the turkey without bread sauce is not the turkey. (An Italian friend of mine once told me that in Sardinia a peasant woman had said to her, ‘Christmas without a roast cat wouldn’t be Christmas.’ Each to his tradition.)

Hugh Johnson once described as the season of the Great Too Much. I'd better leave it, I think, at that - adding only that, since Hugh threw out that ominous little phrase, it's also become the Great Too Long. A ten-day-shut-down, no less, is now normal at Christmas.

Rich fruit cakes never figured in my Christmas cooking, nor in my sister’s. The children didn’t really like them, and we ourselves had had rather too much of them when we were children. The same went for Christmas pudding.