Part 1: The Vittles Christmas Gift Guide 2024
Lourdes holy water mints, canned haleem, a manaeesh clutch, goth egg, and more than a hundred other gift ideas for gifts from Vittles
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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! today we publish the Vittles Christmas Gift Guide, the most incisive list of delicious, beautiful and silly things this season. Our gift guide is simply too massive to fit in one newsletter, and this is Part 1, where we feature gifting ideas made by Vittles Contributors, along with ideas for stocking fillers. In Part 2, we've got books, zines, kitchenware, gifts for kids, and ‘Bougie and Weird’ objects, the only gifting category you need.
For a comfortable reading and purchasing experience, this guide is best viewed on our website. If somehow, you don’t find anything among the more than hundred suggestions listed here, you could always head over to Vittles Prints.
Part 1: The Vittles Christmas Gift Guide 2024
Lourdes holy water mints, canned haleem, a manaeesh clutch, goth egg, and more than a hundred other ideas for gifts.
Contributors Key
AC - Adam Coghlan, AH - Angela Hui, AK - Amy Key, ASM - Anna Sulan Masing, CRC - Chloe-Rose Crabtree, DM - Diya Mukherjee, FG - Feroz Gajia, GC - Gavin Cleaver, IR - Isaac Rangaswami, JC - Jen Calleja, JN - Jonathan Nunn, LG - Laura Goodman, LK - Lily Kelting, LS - Louis Shankar, MAC - Montague Ashley-Craig, MC - Mark Corbyn, MPS - Molly Pepper Steemson, NB - Nick Bramham, OOD - Odhran O’Donoghue, RA - Robbie Armstrong, RB - Rida Bilgrami, RT - Ruby Tandoh, RMJ - Rebecca May Johnson, SD - Sharanya Deepak, SI - Saba Imtiaz, SK - Songsoo Kim, SW - Sean Wyer, TE - Thom Eagle
It’s a Nepo Vittles Christmas
It’s dawn on 25 December and you trundle downstairs to find that the person you love has given you exactly what you were hoping for: a Christmas Day consisting entirely of gifts from Vittles’s multi-talented contributors. Under the tree are Pam Brunton’s treatise Between Two Waters, Laura Goodman’s The Joy of Snacks, Marie Mitchell’s Kin, Tim Anderson’s Hokkaido, and Michèle Roberts’s cookbook French Cooking for One. There are also copies of Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires and the second edition of London Feeds Itself, but you are too full of joy to confess you already own them both – especially when they tell you that they’ve pre-ordered Jenny Lau’s An A-Z of Chinese Food and Anna Sulan Masing’s Chinese and Any Other Asian, which you’ve heard will be the two most in-demand food books of 2025. You go to brush your teeth and find a bottle of Montague Ashley-Craig’s Montamonta, the soap that east London restaurants too cool for Aesop now use. The day unfurls with more edible gifts: there’s a pack of Mark Corbyn’s edam-topped bibingka, which has been mail-ordered and goes well with Lebanese wine from Rami El Sabban. As your family arrives for lunch, there are cocktails from Felix Cohen’s Manhattans Project for those drinking, and cordials from Harry Darby’s Gimlet Bar for those not. As the snow starts to fall, the night fades out in a haze induced by Thom Eagle’s walnut liquor Rovo.
You wake up in a pool of sweat: it’s Tuesday 3 December and you’ve not even started to do any Christmas shopping. Tom Kerridge is in the Guardian recommending you buy a jar of Lao Gan Ma. But you have better ideas.
Frivolous stocking fillers and condiments
The thing about Catholicism is that it really does offer fun looks at every price point. There is Bernini at the top end, while at the more affordable end of the spectrum there’s a robust trinket economy running the gamut from delicate rosary beads to Our Lady of Međugorje travel mugs. This is a boon for anyone with a sub-£20 budget and a lapsed Catholic in their life. Still, it can skew tacky. What a pleasure, then, to find this indubitably chic tin of French mints made with trace amounts of Lourdes holy water. I saw it on Choosing Keeping, but you can also buy it from somewhere more serious like CatholicGiftShop.co.uk. This is my body, this is my blood, these are my Lourdes water mints – at least I think that’s how the Eucharist goes. RT
Pride and Prejudice tea towels
Okay: you see an underdesigned tea towel in Ciccioni’s Etsy shop reading only ‘What excellent boiled potatoes’ and either think it is the most hysterical thing you have ever seen, or you don’t. In Mr Collins’s dinner scene, Jane Austen has given us a perfect culinary comedy of manners: an out-of-place schmuck trying to land an awkward, off-base compliment at a table of women rolling their eyes above his gaze. If ‘It’s been many years since I had such an elegantly prepared vegetable’ does not induce in you a full-body Fremdscham cringe, then the joke can be explained no further. LK
Produced in small batches with the finest baklouti chillies, Sam Lamiri’s harissa, made by his family in La Marsa, is one of the great lockdown success stories. I spent some time in Tunis earlier this year and I have to say no other harissa I’ve tasted in the UK comes close – it’s savoury, smoky, piquant, complex, hot, and extremely (to drop some wine lingo) long. The real deal. I’ve stirred it into soups and stews, tossed it through salads, mixed it into mayo to give my sandwiches some extra oomph, done bumps straight from the jar … it’s worryingly addictive. NB
My father has been using Kitchen King masala to elevate daals and curries for years. Recently, he has begun innovating with it in omelettes, with promising early results. Another friend reports that it is delicious when sprinkled on oven chips. This endlessly versatile masala mix blends nearly twenty spices and aromatics and omits black salt, making it ideal for those unaccustomed to chaat masala’s polarising sulphuric undertones. Most South Asian spice brands will sell a version, but you can find brands such as Badshah, MDH (as this one is), and Shan in most desi stores for around £2. Within weeks your friends and family will be wondering how they ever lived without it. DM
Edible flower, salad, and herb seeds
Jekka McVicar is a pioneering English herb gardener whose farm in Gloucestershire is home to the largest collection of edible herbs in the UK. I’m a Jekka fangirl: she’s planted kitchen herb gardens for Michelin-starred chefs, written more than a dozen books, and beefed with the organisers of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show over a garden gnome. You can order Jekka’s herb seeds online: alongside nine varieties of basil, forty-five varieties of mint, thirty types of rosemary and fifty of thyme, you’ll find Sichuan pepper (both Chinese and Japanese varieties), Vietnamese coriander, and Corsican curry. Natoora? Who needs them? MAC
Cutlery on the go
I hate wooden cutlery. To be more accurate, I hate eating with the dry tongue depressors that have made up disposable cutlery since the government’s ban. I hate it so much that I now travel with chopsticks that come in two parts like a high-quality pool cue (buy posh ones here, or cheap ones here), a smiley-faced ice cream spoon by Grunwerg in Sheffield, and a little Berghoff travel case with knife, spoon, and fork. Your requirements and mileage may vary, but it is always nice to have something personalised, and why not carry cutlery that will bring joy while you eat? Unlike wands, the person picks the cutlery. FG
Grasmere gingerbread is my favourite sweet snack, which may have to do with its scarcity but is also definitely to do with its unique toffee-spicy-dusty-cookie-ish taste, the finest accord. So the gingerbread itself is a great gift but by now perhaps a little obvious (also: the tins <3). What about a 400g bag of crumbs, which Sarah Nelson’s disciples sprinkle over the golden bars before they’re packed?! Imagine this on your granola, ice cream, or even just on a teaspoon directly from the bag. AC
Beyond the Paywall: secret and incredible canned foods; classic party goods; niche vinegars; collectable zines; pretty, scented things.