Unreal Christmas Cookbook III

Victoria Beckham’s Food for the Stylish

We’re pretty sure this is unreal (it’s utterly unreal), just as we are generally convinced that anything where the word celebrity is used is the fantasy of some PR creative committee (do those last three words go together?). Perhaps like so much of Dallas (takes you back) and indeed celebrity culture (now those words are really incompatible) this is all a bad dream. But here goes. As the blurb promises, for just a few tens of thousands of pounds you can eat like multi-talented Victoria and other such multi-talented celebrities.

Multi-talented Victoria’s secret (hmm) is a disarmingly simple one: she employs a team of talented chefs (poor things, only one talent) who for example hand carve a variety of lettuce leaf, chicory and celery salads to her precise instructions, blending four drops of single estate Tuscan olive oil and one of rare vintage balsamic vinegar personally blessed by Pope Francis to dress them. A stylist then arranges each leaf according to a plan devised by the multi-talented Victoria herself! Start your meal with her fabulous pea soup, made with the freshest pea in Harvey Nicks and mineral water flown in from Switzerland, and end it with her witty take on the chocolate fudge sundae, a sun-warmed Revel garnished with half a cashew nut.

The beautifully photographed non-existent tome has images detailing how each dish is constructed, and is ideal for the hard of thinking, using less ink than one of multi-talented hubby David’s tattoos. This could completely change the way we think about food, or it could be so ridiculous that even the British public won’t go for it in spite of the planned TV series and the exclusive launch in Fatuous! Puerile! Vapid! and Brain-Dead! magazines this December. Like this book they don't exist either, but it's just a matter of time. 

Upside to Austerity

In the 1970s Christmas kids' television was special not for the content, but the mere fact that for once we had daytime viewing. Terrible Randolph Scott westerns enjoyed because they were there. Maybe it will be the same with food during this period of austerity. If awareness of value reduces food wastage all the better.

Christmas for too many of us had over the last 20 or 30 years become a time of gross over-indulgence. Familiarity breeding contempt and all that, we valued the surfeit - big turkey or goose, huge ham, tins of chocolates and biscuits, massive Stiltons - less than one imagines a wartime cook valued a pound of sausages.

I have only had one brief flirtation with poverty I'm happy to say, a year as a grantless post-graduate student when I counted every previously earned penny, and parental subs, to get me through the course. That was when my lifelong love began for bacon offcuts and their endless possibilties, when potatoes were the core of many meals, and barely a crust was thrown away. What I learned then is still part of my culinary psyche.

It may be that with changes in global economic balance Britain and Europe never return to the carefree prosperity of the 90s. In which case perhaps we will learn to enjoy what we have all the more, sententious though it is to say so. I'm sure my parents enjoyed the fleeting pleasure of their seasonal indulgences - a bottle of sherry in the house and wine with Christmas dinner - far more than someone shifting more than that every day for a week or so of festivities. Is it too much to hope that governments learn to cope in similar fashion? That wastage on unfeasibly complex IT projects that inevitably fail will end? That they won't order aircraftless aircraft carriers? If they can learn - a huge if - we won't all be as badly off as we had feared.