The Christmas chronicles : notes, stories and essential recipes for midwinter

468 Pages·2017·13.109 MB·English

by  Nigel Slater

Copyright
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk
This eBook edition published by 4th Estate in 2017
Text copyright © Nigel Slater 2017
Location photographs © Nigel Slater 2017
Recipe photographs © Jonathan Lovekin 2017
Nigel Slater asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of
the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and
read the text of this eBook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,
downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information
storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical,
now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Publishers.
Source ISBN: 9780008260194
Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008260200
Version: 2017-09-14
For James
Who once told me ‘You can grow old, just make sure you never grow
up.’
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
November
December
January
February
Index
Acknowledgements
Note about the type
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Nigel Slater
About the Publisher

Introduction
The icy prickle across your face as you walk out into the freezing air. The
piercing burn to your sinuses, like wasabi. Your eyes sparkle, your ears
tingle. The rush of cold to your head is stimulating, vital, energising.
The arrival of the first snap of cold is invigorating, like jumping into
an ice pool after the long sauna of summer. Winter feels like a renewal, at
least it does to me. I long for that ice-bright light, skies of pale blue and
soft grey light that is at once calm and gentle, fresh and crisp. Away from
the stifling airlessness of summer, I once again have more energy. Winter
has arrived. I can breathe again.
My childhood memories of summer are few and precious. Picking
blackcurrants for pocket money. A vanilla ice cream, held between two
wafers, eaten on the seafront with my mum, seagulls overhead. Sitting in
a meadow, buttercups tickling my bare legs, eating ham sandwiches and
drinking dandelion and burdock. Pleading with my parents to stop the car
so I could get out and pick scarlet poppies, with petals like butterflies’
wings that wilted before I could get them home. These are virtually the
only recollections I have of those early summers. It is the winters that
stay in my memory, carved deep as a fjord, as long and clear as an icicle.
It is as if my entire childhood was lived out in the cold months, a
decade spent togged up in duffel coats and mittens, wellingtons and
woolly hats. To this day, I am never happier than when there is frost on
the roof and a fire in the hearth. I have always preferred snow underfoot
to sand between my toes.
I love the crackle of winter. The snap of dry twigs underfoot, boots
crunching on frozen grass, a fire spitting in the hearth, ice thawing on a
pond, the sound of unwrapping a Christmas present from its paper. The
innate crispness of the season appeals to me, like newly fallen snow,
frosted hedges, the first fresh page of a new diary. Yes, there is softness in
the cold months, too, the voluminous jumpers and woolly hats, the steam
rising from soup served in a deep bowl, the light from a single candle and
the much-loved scarf that would feel like a burden at any other time of
year.
We all know winter. The mysterious whiff of jasmine or narcissus
caught in the cold air; the sadness of spent, blackened fireworks the
morning after Bonfire Night; a row of pumpkins on a frosted allotment
spied from a train window; the magical alchemy of frost and smoke.
Winter is the smell of freshly cut ivy or yew and the childish excitement
of finding that first, crisp layer of fine ice on a puddle. It is a freckling of
snow on cobbled pavements and the golden light from a window on a
dark evening that glows like a Russian icon on a museum wall. But for
each midwinter sunset, there is another side to this season. Like the one
of 1962–3, when farmers, unable to negotiate deep snowdrifts, wept as
their animals froze to death in the fields; the snap of frail bones as an
elderly neighbour slips on the ice; the grim catalogue of deaths of the
homeless from hypothermia. Winter is as deadly as she is beautiful.
A walk through the snow
It started with berries. Holly, rowan, rosehips. A project to record the
plants, edible and poisonous, that we spotted on our walk to school. Two
miles, in my case, of hedgerows to inspect daily. Hardly a project for me;
I knew those hedgerows intimately, each tree and ditch, every lichen-
covered gate. I knew which had wild sweet peas – Lathyrus odoratus – or
primroses hidden by twigs and where to find a bullfinch’s nest. When you
walk the same route every day on your own, you get to know these
things. A tree you must duck to avoid a soaking if it has rained during the
night; the progress of a slowly decomposing tree stump among the grass;
a bush that delights with a froth of white blossom in spring that by
autumn is a mass of purple-black berries. You get to know the site of the
sweetest blackberries and the exact location of the wild violets, white and
piercing purple, that twinkle like stars in dark holloways.
Even then I knew that hedgerows were sacred, the homes of birds’
nests and voles, hedgehogs and haws. I knew that the long, slim rosehips
came from the single wild roses that are to this day one of my favourite
flowers, along with the hawthorn. I knew too that my father’s name for
hawthorn was ‘bread and cheese’, an ancient reference to the usefulness
of its leaves and berries in winter. I also understood that the scarlet berries
of yew and holly were never, ever, for consumption.

It was the berries left behind in the winter that held a special
fascination for me. The darkening rosehips and hawthorn berries seen
against a tapestry of frosty leaves; the solemn beauty of ivy and
hypericum berries against a grey wall; a rosehip trapped in ice. Walking
was part of my country childhood. A solitary one, but by no means
lonely. Not that there was any choice. My father drove back to the Black
Country during the week. We had just four buses, two on a Wednesday –
one there, one back – and two on Saturday. A bike, you say? Not up the
steep hills that surrounded Knightwick, with a gym bag and a leather
satchel full of books. There were always books. We lived on the border of
two counties. Home and school were in Worcestershire, the nearest shops
in Herefordshire. The walks were wretched in summer, sweaty and
hateful, full of stinging nettles and sunburn, but in autumn and winter
each day was an adventure. I rarely got home before darkness fell. There
was a moment, a patch of barely half an hour, when the sun would burn
fiercely in the winter sky, just before it slid away, that I regarded as
unmissable. Something I had to be outside for.
It was the walk to school that started everything. A life lived with the
rhythm of the seasons. Not purely the food (miles from a supermarket or
a greengrocer, we ate more seasonally than most), but the outdoors too,
the landscape, the garden and the market. The sounds and smells that
mark one season as different from another.
By the way, I kept that school project, neatly written in fountain pen,
its berry-studded exercise books covered in dried leaves and curls of ‘old
man’s beard’, for almost twenty years. Like pretty much everything I
owned, it was destroyed in a house fire shortly after I moved to London.
Getting to grips with the season
Winter is caused by the movement of the Earth, the dark winter months
appearing when the Earth’s axis is at its furthest point from the Sun. For
all its bare twigs and pale, watery sunshine, winter is very much alive.
Underneath the fallen leaves things are happening at a rate of knots; new
life burgeons. Bulbs are sprouting, buds are bursting through grey bark,
new shoots push their way to the surface. Many plants require
vernalisation, a prolonged patch of low temperatures, in order to grow.
Tulips, freesias, crocus and snowdrops, for instance. (I sometimes feel I