If you want to get back to the true spirit of Christmas, just sew the back end of a pig to the front of a capon. That’s how they do it at the Weald and Downland Living Museum in West Sussex, recreating a 14th-century festive centrepiece based on a mythical beast called a cockatrice (or “cokyntryce”, as their recipe has it). Lest you think it a wasteful exercise, they made use of the front of the pig and the back of the capon to create an “antitrice”, which is only mildly more disgusting.
The World’s Most Extraordinary Christmas Dinners (Channel 4) was a seasonal mashup of bizarre, off-beat and outside-the-box yuletide meals, many eaten by people who were prepared to celebrate Christmas in July for the benefit of the cameras. We were shown Christmas on a nuclear submarine (not quite – the head chef went home for the holidays and it was apparent that no one was going to spend months underwater in order to film some sailors eating turkey), Christmas in a posh hotel and Christmas in space.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Christmas without a little excess. At the five-star Rosewood hotel in London, where guests pay about £200 a head for their Christmas dinner, the focus was on a 3.7-metre (12ft) centrepiece made of gold painted branches, created by a “superflorist”, Kally Ellis. She was also in charge of the tree, which needed to be 7.6 metres high and 4.3 metres across to fit under an arch in the hotel courtyard. This necessitated a trip to a Christmas tree farm where they grow them on that sort of scale – 10 hectares (25 acres) of giant conifers, all cosmetically symmetrical.
Elsewhere, Mark Hussey, a jeweller, set out to make the world’s most expensive crackers – or rather a pair of diamond-studded silver “cracker cuffs” that, once pulled, could be slotted on to the arms of a matching bejewelled candelabra. The whole contraption would set you back £150,000 and you would still have to buy your own crackers. One didn’t get the impression that a buyer was waiting in the wings – Hussey is still in possession of the £82,000 bauble he made in 2009 – but act now if you are interested, before he has to give the diamonds back.
Anne McClain, an astronaut, is preparing to spend her first Christmas onboard the International Space Station. She arrived only a few weeks ago, but her Christmas dinner was sent ahead months back on a supply mission; she chose her menu in April from a selection of pouches that included flaked, smoked turkey. “It might look like posh cat food,” said the narrator, “but pouches are the best way to stop a weightless dinner from flying away.” It didn’t just look like posh cat food; it looked like it tasted like posh cat food, too.
Jonjo Wring rears Indonesian black chickens – “the rarest chickens in the world”, according to the narration. They are mostly sold as pets – a prize specimen can fetch £1,000 – but the less-than-perfect ones could, Wring believes, make for an exotic alternative to turkey. The one he selected for dinner had but one tiny flaw – a dab of white on the tip of its beak. To me, this looked like something you could fix with a permanent marker, but Jonjo consigned the poor creature to the oven. As a roaster, a black bird is a bit off-putting – it looks burnt from the get-go – but apparently it tastes a bit like chicken. Well, exactly like chicken.
Back at the museum, the cockatrice and his pig-headed mate were spit-roasted for four hours, before being slathered in a golden coating made from egg yolk and saffron and then roasted some more. “Conjuring up the three things we associate with Christmas,” said the voiceover, “gold, Frankenstein and, mmm, er …” Somebody deserves credit for the effort that went into that. And the blame.
This was the sort of seasonal fare that comes in handy when your brain starts to turn to mush: deeply undemanding, sporadically interesting and larded with excruciating puns. You could, I suppose, have got angry about the idiotic extremes of wealth implied by the existence of a diamond-encrusted Christmas cracker, but it hardly seemed worth the effort. This is supposed to be the season of goodwill, a time to sit back, glaze over and enjoy.
