Compendium 3: Christmas 2024
Hello and welcome to December’s Compendium.
Thank you for the comments, emails and Notes relating to last month’s. This time around you have a festive playlist, two cracking recipes, a few present ideas, yet more recipes just a click away, and more besides.
1: Christmas Playlist
Let’s not mess about: here’s the Christmas playlist you require for when peeling spuds, sorting sprouts, or relaxing with a cheeky mulled cider in front of the fire.
Three plus hours of festive sounds - kicking off with maybe the best of all Christmas songs, Otis’ Merry Christmas Baby. Or maybe the best is Donny Hathaway’s This Christmas. And, fine as they are, there’s no Fairytale of New York or 2000 Miles, as overplaying means I don’t think I’m the only one who needs to hear them no more than every 4th year.
2: Christmas present ideas
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A place on the Food Writing Weekend I’m running in spring with Diana Henry
This is the first residential course Diana and I have run in 5 years. It will be special. It is almost sold out. Whether a comparative beginner or published and somehow needing inspiration, join us if you want to take your writing to another place. More info and to book
Gift vouchers
Let them decide with e-vouchers for you to send to your recipient. Lasting for a year and redeemable against plants, seeds, books and more. Click here.
Vegetables/ easy and inventive vegetarian suppers
My latest book, in the Times’ top 10 Cookbooks of the Year, and very pleasingly larged up by Yotam Ottolenghi: ‘Mark puts vegetables in their place, and that’s right at the centre of the table. Follow him on a journey through the seasons, feasting on your way. Simple, soulful, seasonal.’
You can buy it for one of three prices - depending on income and circumstances - on my website. The bad place has it for just over £19, and Hive for £20, here.
If circumstances conspire…
And most of us have been there…
If you are in tricky circumstances and shy of the money for a present for someone who loves to cook, email me and I’ll send you a copy of my book Spice/a cook/s companion, free.
3: Eat
The perfect thing to do with either leftover Christmas pudding or Christmas cake. It’s from my book Spice/a cook’s companion.
Grandad’s Trifle
The first time I made this was one of those peculiar days between Christmas and New Year, which - depending or circumstance and disposition - are either a cheese-filled relief from the everyday, or a discombobulating wave of incoherent mornings and what-day-is-it afternoons.
That evening, my mum called to say that my stepdad and her man of 40 odd years was, at last after his illness, about to discover the answers we’re all - in more ways than one - dying to know. We and his son and other half met in a circle of plastic chairs around the bed. What started sombre became more light hearted as the hours passed. “Well, at least I kept the receipt from his Christmas present”. “I haven’t given him his Christmas bottle of rum yet”.
When it became clear that perhaps tonight wasn’t to be the night, we left agreeing to reconvene in the morning. We had talked about needing a snack to keep us going and I promised to bring in the trifle I’d just made as it seemed faintly ridiculous to do so, in just the fashion that he might have enjoyed.
My daughter had asked me to say goodbye to grandad for her; when he unexpectedly opened his eyes a little, I said hello and gave him her love instead. We ate the trifle as he slept on a little before slipping away.
250g Christmas pudding or cake
12 large plums, stoned and halved
30g sugar
8 cardamom pods
A splash of red wine vinegar
300ml double cream
300ml full fat milk
2 tbsp cornflour
70g caster sugar
2 bay leaves
4 tbsp cider vinegar
5 medium egg yolks
300ml double cream
100g crème fraiche
140g mascarpone
50g hazelnuts, crushed
A generous drizzling of pomegranate molasses
Passion fruit dust
Stone and half the plums, and bring to a simmer in 1cm of water in a heavy-based pan over a medium heat. Add the sugar and cardamom. Simmer until the fruit fall into disrepair but before they lose all composure. Remove from the heat, allow to cool and stir in the rosewater.
For the custard:
Warm the milk, cream and bay in a medium sized thick-based pan and bring it slowly to the boil. Remove from the heat and allow to infuse as the mix cools a little.
In a cup, use your fingers to beans the cornflour with an equal volume of water until smooth.
Whisk the egg yolks and sugar in a bowl until pale and thickened. Remove the bay leaves from the warm creamy milk. Slowly add the warm mixture into the bowl, stirring it constantly into the sugary egg yolks until well combined. Tip the mixture back into the saucepan using a rubber spatula to get as much as possible, and warm over a low-medium heat.
Cook for 10 minutes or so, stirring constantly. You’ll feel the custard start to thicken; reduce the heat a touch if this is happening too quickly for comfort. The custard will thicken enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon, at which point turn off the heat.
Use your fingers to blend the cornflour mixture if it has separated a little, then stir it into the custard. Cook for a couple of minutes more, stirring constantly to prevent sticking and to keep it smooth: the custard will become very thick. Remove it from the heat and, stirring constantly, add the vinegar and incorporate thoroughly.
Place a damp tea towel over the top of the pan to prevent the custard forming a skin as it cools.
Toast the crushed hazelnuts briefly over a medium-high heat in a dry pan. A little light darkening and intensifying of colour is what you are looking for, rather than scorch.
To assemble:
Crumble the Christmas pud into the bottom of a trifle bowl, and drown it in aromatic plums. Pour the custard over and refrigerate until set.
Whisk the ricotta, crème fraiche, mascarpone and icing sugar in a large bowl, until combined, and use a spatula to spread it across the custard. Scatter the cream with hazelnuts, drizzle plentifully with pomegranate molasses and dust the entirety generously with dried passion fruit.
Put the trifle somewhere no-one else will find it and return regularly to demolish it in instalments.
4: Eyes
Cookbooks of the Year
I love writing my Cookbook of the Month column for Delicious magazine - I get to look through perhaps 600 cookbooks over the course of the year, and take very seriously the choosing of my 5 favourites each month.
To close the year, I’ve chosen my best 25. Click here to see them. Each so deserving of your money, every one a brilliant present. Add to them Diana Henry’s brilliant recent reissues, Caroline Eden’s Cold Kitchen and the numerous other excellent food related books and 2024 has been quite the year for food writing.
Andrew Timothy O’Brien’s Bramble and Briar Substack
For the gardeners, a lyrically written window into the pleasures of a garden.
5: Drink
I’d rather drink fermented bin juice that allow a sip of mulled wine pass my lips - too often it tastes like vinegar pot pourri - but mulled cider is very different gravy. One for when you are reading in front of the fire.
Mulled cider
While you can adjust and experiment with the flavours, you cannot dilute on quality: use good cider and fresh spices. Ordinarily, I’d go with three flavours max - eg cinnamon, clove and star anise - but here is the exception that proves the rule. As numerous as the spices may be, none are lost to the whole. The more unusual spices are available here.
Sweeten on serving and a little under what you think, as the spices will give a sweetening impression themselves.
1½ litres dry cider
2 cloves
3 star anise
6 allspice berries
6 green cardamom pods, seeds only
And either:
6 Ethiopian passion berries
6 cinnamon berries
6 verbena berries
Or:
10cm cinnamon stick
1 extra clove
2 extra green cardamom pods, seeds only
a tbsp or 2 of honey
Add the cider to a pan, along with all the ingredients apart from than the honey. Bring up the heat slowly and simmer for 5 minutes or so.
Turn off the heat and allow to infuse for 5 minutes with the lid on. Taste and stir in a little honey if you think it needs it. Serve immediately.
6: Garden
Patio fruit
For those with limited space or who just fancy small fruit trees: cherries, apples, plums, peaches and more, all growing only to 1.2m - perfect for growing in a container or the ground. More here.
7: My other writing
The Guardian: Festive drinks
If you are short of a present or two and like the idea of homemade, these 6 recipes for drinks-as-presents might be just what you need. There’s nothing to stop you enjoying them yourself either. Some boozy, some without: I hope you enjoy them.
Scribehound gardening
This month I wrote about three things you really shouldn’t east, grow or have anything much to do with. A public service of sorts. You can read it here or click the image below. Your first article is free, and then there’s an offer to get you going if you like the sound of receiving an article each day from the likes of Joe Swift, Ann-Marie Powell, Sarah Raven and Adam Frost, and you can cancel anytime if it’s not for you.
Country Life: Savory
My column for Country Life this month is about winter and summer savory - two hugely under-appreciated herbs
Click here to read about them.
And if you fancy growing winter savory yourself, click here - and don’t forget, paid subscribers in the UK get 25% off plants and seeds from my nursery.
Sunday Times Food
Every month, I come up with three recipes that are tweaks on the familiar - that elevate the usual with a touch of something special. For the festive edition, I have 6 Christmas recipes - a simple, spiced dry-brined turkey, and much more. Honestly, they are really special: I hope you’ll take a look.
As ever, the comments carry much gold…
The recipes are behind their paywall here.
8: Born To Do What They Do
For a few years in the early-mid 70s everything Joni did was gold. Some prefer Blue, others have Hejira as her best: for me, it depends on the time of the day and the day of the week. Today, as the afternoon darkens off, it might be Hejira - a perfect album of travel, love, time and life. And there’s Jaco Pastorius’ bass playing in sweet harmony with Joni’s words. Here Coyote, apparently written about her fling with actor Sam Shepherd while on Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975.
In her book Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings, Ruth Charnock called the song ‘either the most flirtatious song about fucking or the most graphic song about flirting ever written’: you decide.
More soon…in the meantime, the merriest of Christmases to you
Mark
A happy Christmas to you!
Hello