You Can’t Go Wrong With Delia

Brian Dillon on Christmas with Delia. Illustration by Seb Tanti Burlò.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today’s essay, by Brian Dillon, is about Delia Smith and the constancy of the Christmas meal. This will be the last newsletter proper of the year before we go on a Christmas break, although we will return for a special two-part review of the year next week.

A final pin on our noticeboard: the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2025 are now open, and there is a Newcomer award that we suspect many of you reading will be eligible for. To read more about it, see the GFW’s website here.

2024 has been our best year yet, and it’s been a pleasure sending you work by our brilliant contributors every week. To read this year’s newsletters, you can browse our back catalogue here. Thank you so much for reading, from all of us at Vittles. See you in 2025! JN, RMJ, SD, AC, and OOD

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And if you haven’t got someone a present yet, and are leaving it to the last minute…

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You Can’t Go Wrong With Delia

Brian Dillon on Christmas with Delia. Illustration by Seb Tanti Burlò.

Andy Park is a sixty-one-year-old from Wiltshire who appears occasionally in the British press, calling himself Mr Christmas and claiming to have celebrated the holiday every day of the year since July 1993 (aside from, that is, those periods – weeks at a time – when for medical or financial reasons he has gone cold turkey). In the pages of the Sun or the Daily Mirror, Park puts on his Santa hat and an amusing jumper, pulls a cracker in his perma-tinselled living room, and recounts the festive rigours of his day. At breakfast (mince pies, sherry) he opens a card he has thoughtfully sent himself. At three in the afternoon he chooses which year from his collection of Queen’s-speech recordings he should watch; patriotic Andy has not yet joined the new Caroline era. The inevitable roast dinner follows – he alternates between turkey and chicken. Andy does not reveal how his yuletide regime accommodates his work as an electrician or his part-time career in music, but Mr Christmas is not made of money. Like many in Britain, he has had to rein in his Christmas spending during the cost-of-living crisis. Still, he is laden with statistics, some perhaps merrily exaggerated: £500,000 spent on food and drink, 1.5 million mince pies consumed, 3.5 million sprouts. I cannot find the source now, but I’m sure that when I first read about Mr Christmas it was clear there was a Mrs Park toiling daily to supply the monstrous child’s merriment. And this fact, alongside the likely alimentary consequences, was the most revolting aspect of his (very possibly confected) story. Honestly, though, my first response to Mr Christmas was also laced with sympathy: I can quite see how this might happen.

A traditional Christmas dinner is the one meal I can say for certain I have mastered: it never (almost never) fails. As for so many Christmas cooks in Britain, my day – and the meal itself – belongs to Delia Smith: roast turkey and ham, all-in-one baked vegetables, sprouts with chestnuts, a sausage-meat stuffing Delia says she first encountered at Thanksgiving in the US, two Christmas puddings hastily mixed and anxiously steamed around 20 December (Stir-up Sunday long passed). The whole thing could not be more conventional. I’ve only lately thought to buy my own copy of Delia Smith’s Christmas, though – the key recipes from the 1990 cookbook are just a google away, and a list of provisions lives permanently among the notes on my phone. ‘Have you made your list?’ my wife will ask in early December. No need: it’s all there, inventoried by dish, with a few personal additions. Who, for instance, celebrates Christmas without a large jar of pickled onions that clouds and declines in the fridge for several months before it is at last wistfully binned?

I have sometimes consulted Delia’s later volume, Delia’s Happy Christmas (2009), that is frustrating because evidence of an urge to update and refine for contemporary tastes. It is a laudable desire: to imagine Christmas not only for vegetarians or the allergy-prone, but also those who may find it all too much, too rich, too antique, too English, too white, too redolent of Christmases best forgotten or of a mid-twentieth-century impulse to reproduce a comforting and imagined Victorian festival. I’m convinced, without rancour, that some of these revisionists are deluded, and I will impose on them (loved ones included) a traditional dinner, come what may. I will turn, in short, into Mr Christmas.

I was a child in Ireland in the 1970s, which explains only certain aspects of my Christmas of the mind. My father was a Dubliner who lived with his parents until he married at forty; my mother had come up from the country – their conceptions of Christmas must have been subtly different. Maybe it was my mother’s doing that we never had a Christmas tree: it had not, I think, been a habit on the farm, and now it was easy to say that, with three small boys in the house, a tree was one more thing to worry about. During December my brothers and I were always looking out, on dark duffel-coated Sunday walks, for other people’s trees, which we counted as we went. In those weeks before Christmas, my mother would playfully warn us that, if we were not careful, the season might revert to what she’d known around our age in north Kerry, and we’d be lucky to receive a lone orange in each of our stockings (which we did not actually have – what had become of the Christmas stockings of my mother’s country childhood?). I also doubt there had been turkeys when she was growing up in the 1940s; a pair of obnoxious geese still menaced our bare legs in the summers when we visited my grandfather. A goose, my mother said (along with everyone else) was a very greasy bird: she had long ago come round to the turkey and all that went with it.

In our case, that meant first of all, on Christmas Eve, being served up a selection of simmered giblets for our tea, leftovers from the stock my mother had made for the following day’s turkey soup. I was fond only of the neck. On Christmas Day, the soup itself was delicious, enriched with something from Knorr. Aside from the turkey, almost everything on the plate that followed had been boiled. There were a few roast potatoes, but the cultish English anxiety about getting the potatoes ‘right’ did not feature. Otherwise: boiled carrots, boiled sprouts, boiled parsnips, boiled ham, boiled potatoes alongside the roast – nothing about the season should detract, it seemed, from the habit of the time to boil the life out of all that moved or grew. And yet, in my memory, none of it suffered from being simple or crude – not even the stuffing, which had never seen a chestnut or scrap of sausage meat and consisted only of bread, onion and herbs. This was followed some days later by a pan full of my mother’s turkey-and-ham-and-stuffing-and-mash rissoles, for which, I reflected aged about ten, it would be worth giving up all the rest of Christmas.

My mother died when she was fifty and I was sixteen. For Christmas 1985 and a few that followed, her sisters supplied the puddings, but my father – who had hardly cooked in his life until my mother became ill – insisted on making Christmas dinner for my brothers and me. (He also quickly became an excellent baker, shrinking only at the challenge of matching my mother’s soda bread.) There may have been a frozen turkey the first Christmas after she was gone, but otherwise nothing changed – as much a symptom of my father’s inability to speak to his sons about their loss as from his exhausting efforts to supply some normality in a family that had never, in other respects, been normal. In a kitchen drawer, lightly stained, was a notebook with the owl-face logo of Odlums Flour; in this, my mother had handwritten many recipes, and tucked others between the pages. Did my dad consult this at Christmas? Or canvass advice from my aunts? I have a tender recollection of him simply feeling his way on the day, while my brothers and I tried to reproduce, on a gold-tasselled green cloth, the dining-table layout of childhood, and my father’s sister turned up at the door to half-spoil it all with her insistence Christmas was only for the children and she couldn’t look at a turkey.

My father died in the summer of 1990, and as that year crawled to a close BBC ran a six-episode TV series – from mid-November to just five days before Christmas – in which Delia talked viewers through a detailed timetable for last-minute shopping and cooking duties on the day itself. Did I see any of these episodes? Who knows: before and after my parents’ deaths I spent much or most of my free time watching television, so it would have been just like my brothers and me to tune in to some quintessential British comfort-television with only a little bit of irony or amusement. We had other things on our minds, too, trying to live without adult guidance. Amid the chaos, I took it upon myself to provide occasional treats. I dug out my mother’s recipe for millionaire’s shortbread (‘caramel squares’ to us), and another for toffee as hard as bullet-proof glass. And at Christmas – or rather the day following (St Stephen’s Day in Ireland), after we had spent the 25th at an aunt’s – I cooked dinner for the three of us. It is a mystery to me now how I succeeded in improvising this meal. There was no ham, and I simply estimated it would take a few hours to roast a turkey. Even after we had sold the family home and dispersed into bedsits and shared houses, I would convene this trio of diffident boys, with hardly a thing of any emotional import to say to each other, around my Christmas dinner. Good job, we’d agree at the end of the day, like satisfied but antisocial old men.

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Nowadays, my Christmas meal – and I am always in charge, or have put myself in charge – is derived entirely from Delia. But before the moment I embraced this role, there was a necessary hiatus in which I put past Christmases behind me. I moved to the UK in 1995 and didn’t make a full Christmas dinner again for over twenty years. There were Christmases when I was back and forth to London or Dublin for this or that friend’s or girlfriend’s family Christmas. There was the difficult year when Christmas came from the hot-meal counter at Asda, and could have been worse. I learned from a partner, and from British friends, that Delia Smith’s Christmas – original hardback edition, gold lettering, red ribbon, author photo styled as a gift tag – was the most reliable source, with some tweaks, amendments and omissions as family circumstance and eccentricity demanded, of course. (Consider bread sauce, for example: the name appeals, but for my Christmas meal it exists only in the pages of Delia, where it seems to recall not Victorian cheer but some deeper, seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Christmas, pallid but lightly spiced, bulking out meagre fare.) Then came a Christmas when I joined alone an old friend’s family celebration in Dublin, a welcoming gathering of couples, kids, exes, whoever.

Ever since, for the best part of a decade, I have made Christmas dinner for my Canadian wife and her parents, whether they are visiting us in London, we them in Ottawa, or the four of us staying in a rented house somewhere in the southwest, more or less detained by howling wind and rain. Each year, with some assistance regarding vegetables and cranberry sauce, I perform the role of harried Christmas cook (much more harried than in my early twenties, when I took a notion to cook for my brothers). There was the year when the power went out, the year the kitchen sink blocked up an hour before dinnertime, the year of the Aga whose workings none of us could fathom. But everybody has been very patient with me. In a family that for years abjured a traditional Christmas and went on a sunny holiday instead, they have adapted to the Delia-levied schedule by which I rise early on Christmas Day to start roasting the ham before anything else occurs. That there is both a turkey and a ham is the first cultural hurdle to get over, the second a surfeit of carbs, the third the fact none of this can be achieved without a late-morning beer at the least, and more likely a light buzz throughout the day. A fine compromise has been reached between culinary routine in our small flat and the lure of long walks in the park or by the river. It is understood that, for a time, my heart is with Delia.

‘A very important message for all frazzled Christmas cooks’, Delia writes on page 201 of Delia Smith’s Christmas. ‘The good news is that what you now have, in addition to your aching limbs and heavy eyelids, is a house full of food and absolutely no more cooking to do. So stretch out, fill your glass and have a very Happy Christmas!’ I suspect that thirty-four years on, Delia is quite aware that her Christmas books and TV series are not at all the nostalgic lessons in an old-fashioned English Christmas that they might seem, nor even the softly modernised Christmas (easy mincemeat cake, deconstructed trifle, mulled wine sorbet) that sidles up on the page to the sturdier recipes, but rather a kind of absolution. The question of tradition disappears along with memories, good and bad, of Christmases past. Instead, amid all her eagerness for us Christmas cooks to both get ahead of ourselves and relax, there is the sense that she will take us out of time, where we may forget how much we wanted from Christmas or wanted to escape it. It’s not us, it’s Delia. But also: you can’t go wrong with Delia. She has never, as she reminds us on page and screen, had a dry turkey in her life.

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Credits

Brian Dillon is an Irish writer based in London. His Essayism Trilogy was published in 2024 as part of the Fitzcarraldo First Decade Collection. He is working on Ambivalence: An Education.

Illustration by Seb Tanti Burlò.

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