In my experience, clever food is not appreciated at Christmas. It makes the little ones cry and the old ones nervous.”
- Jane Grigson, English cookbook author
Reading this quote last week, I felt torn. Part of me instinctively agrees with it, that Christmas is not a time to be trying many new things. We love our traditions, and gathering with family and friends gives us an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to one another by keeping these traditions going, helping us remember times past by recreating them in the present.
And yet there's another part of me that loves to shake up the traditions and mix familiar elements into attempts at clever new dishes that will stimulate my palate and my imagination.
After Thanksgiving, for instance, I made ice cream studded with leftover cranberry sauce and chunks of dark chocolate. This was just familiar enough to feel seasonal, and yet it was not something I would have offered on Thanksgiving day, knowing it would have been met with raised eyebrows and polite queries of, "But where's the pie?"
Traditions can be life-affirming and home-warming; they can also be reminders of things in our past that we would prefer to forget, or ties that we would like to break. Are there food traditions that you've deliberately chosen not to carry on - as symbols of independence or new life? Are there others that you've decided to keep?
And are you more of a "clever food" cook at Christmas, delighting in challenging your family's palate with new things? Or do you love the comfort foods?
i've noticed, not to be morbid here, that we've become more experimental since a) my grandparents passed away, abd b) since my sister and i moved out of the house. i doubt we'll ever have sushi for thanksgiving, but we've pretty much abandoned turkey--nobody really likes it enough to make it worth the effort. we'd rather have a rib roast.
i do wonder how that dynamic will change once my sister and i start having our own kids, but i suspect the turkey's gone forever.
I definitley like to buck tradition. Why do we eat turkey every year when it's difficult to prepare and no one really likes it? For Xmas last year I made truffled grilled cheese sandwiches and soup (I forget what kind of soup it was). It was so yummy and a gourmet twist on a comfort food standby.
I love all the traditional stuff, I even love my mother-in-law's green jellied salad. The rest of the year I take great delight in using my friends and family as guinea pigs for new recipes. I guess a little ying and yang (or is it tit for tat?)
My childhood was filled with the aromas of cooking in my grandmother's house all year, not just at Christmastime. However, in our Italian family, Christmas was when the extended family would gather at my grandmother's house and we'd make the Christmas cookies. Lots of 'em!
I decided this year to try to carry on part of our family tradition by making pizzelles in my own kitchen, which is many hundreds of miles from my extended family. I searched high and low for a pizzelle iron (or a press as some call it) and finally did find on at Cook's Warehouse. I called my cousin to get Nanny's pizzelle recipe and went to town. When all was said and done, I had dozens of gorgeous pizzelles and my house smelled of anise all that night and the next day! What could be finer?
As for tradition, I think as long as our traditions make us happy, we should try to continue them for future generations, while at the same time being open to making new ones.