Posh nosh, and plenty of it!
We’ve got Dickens to thank for turning us into a nation of annual binge eaters. It was when Ebenezer Scrooge made amends by ordering the fattest turkey in town to send to poor Bob Cratchit that supersizing became a Christmas tradition. Christmas was soon the biggest feast (literally) in the Christian calendar. But Dickens was right — the gift of food is a wonderful thing, not least for the giver who shops online, where there are now some excellent foodie websites to be found.
Daylesford Organic should be your first stop for posh nosh. It was set up by Lady Carole Bamford in a beautifully converted barn in the Cotswolds, and has a website to match. Organic venison is Daylesford’s speciality, but its range includes cheeses, fish, breads, vegetables, dips and wines. You can even sign up for the quarterly newsletter, if only to read about the produce you can’t afford to buy. Another website offering a food lifestyle service is Machiavelli, a London-based mail order provider of gourmet Italian foodstuffs. Olive oil has long been an acceptable alternative to wine as a dinner party contribution, but they sell everything from dolcelatte to big boxes of panettone — an impressive present and good for making bread-and-butter pudding.
A ham is a more prosaic gift, but it makes the perfect Christmas Eve fare, served hot or cold with a parsley or redcurrant sauce. Dukeshills sell half and whole cooked hams, and offer a choice of a Wiltshire, a dry cure York or their distinctive Shropshire Black, which boasts ‘having spent a fortnight wallowing in a special marinade of molasses, juniper and spices’, before being left to mature for three months.
Hampers make a safe Christmas present, although they can cost more than the sum of their parts. Snobs will insist that a hamper should only be from Fortnums, and it was certainly true at school that the smartest parents were those with the black F&M stamped on their sports day hampers. But why buy from the royal grocers when the royals are now grocers themselves? The Prince of Wales’s Duchy Originals are swiftly becoming a household name, and even the monarch has her own farm shop, housed in some converted potting sheds on the edge of Windsor Castle Home Park. Their website offers a range of hampers named, curiously, after turrets from the castle. The ‘Garter’ is the biggest, but I would estimate you get at least a thousand calories for every one of your £195 spent.
An equally calorific but less expensive present are the Chelsea Buns available by post from Fitzbillies of Cambridge, which come in fours, eights or twelves in smart dark-green boxes. Established in 1922, Fitzbillies have perfected a closely guarded recipe for these rich and syrupy masterpieces, which they claim are the stickiest buns in the world and should be served hot with a dollop of ice cream. I can confirm that they travel well, and make an impressive and original gift. Indeed, if £90 seems like a reasonable annual expenditure for buns, Fitzbillies offer a year’s subscription of four per month to any address in the UK, with the option of a different message to be sent each time. Would it be too sickly to quote Tiny Tim, and put ‘God bless us, every one!’?
Matthew Bell
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