The origins of the Christmas dinner

Christmas has long been a time for family and friends to gather for festive feasts but what we eat on the big day has changed significantly through the centuries.

“No one era invented Christmas,” said food historian Annie Gray on the i news site, and “the rituals which surround it have evolved”. Although “much of the surface paraphernalia of the modern Christmas can be ascribed to one or two decades (mainly the 1840s), there are deeper themes which cross the centuries”, she wrote.

Chief among these is feasting, yet while everyone has an opinion about what makes the perfect Christmas dinner, the origins of the meal as we now know it are less well known.

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What is the history of Christmas feasts?

The forerunner of the Christmas dinner is believed to to be the mid-winter feast, which dates back to the late Neolithic period. Held to celebrate the pagan winter solstice, these feasts are believed to have included beef stews or pork cooked on spits, and also “crab apples, hazelnuts, sloes and blackberries”, said English Heritage.

When the Romans arrived in Britain in the first century AD, they brought their own winter celebrations, most notably Saturnalia, held between 17 and 23 December, to honour Saturn, the god of seeds and sowing.

“Christmas started to look a little more familiar in the Middle Ages, and so did the Christmas dinner,” said History. The monks and nuns of the “many monastic orders scattered across the country” were allowed to add spices to their food as usual rules were relaxed in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and their tables were “laden with pies, minced meat dishes, roast meats and fish”.

Such feasts also proved popular with the Tudors. Turkeys first arrived in England from their native North America during King Henry VIII’s reign, and proved to be “a popular – if expensive – addition to a festive menu that was already bursting at the seams with a cornucopia of roasted and stuffed meats”, according to the site.

An unusual favourite dish from the period that has not stood the test of time was Christmas Pie, which consisted of a pigeon, placed inside a partridge, inside a chicken, inside a goose, inside a turkey, inside a pastry case called a coffin.

The Christmas pudding – which began life as plum porridge – and mince pies also made their first appearances during the medieval period. The original versions contained mutton and beef with raisins, currents and spices.

Another modern-day festive sweet treat, Christmas cake, “originates from a cake made for and eaten on Twelfth Night (5 January)”, said Great British Chefs. In the mid 1600s, Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans banned feasting of any kind on Twelfth Night, so “people started to make it on Christmas Day instead, when a little merriment was permitted”.

How did the modern Christmas dinner evolve?

During the second half of the 18th century, the “most controversial of Christmas foods”, the Brussels sprout, made its way to England from the Continent, said History. The sprout “quickly established itself as a yearly addition to the Christmas table” and has “divided opinion ever since”, the site continued.

Today, the sprout industry is worth more than £65m a year, “and the British eat more of these divisive little vegetables than any other nation in Europe”.

Many of the other Christmas traditions that we follow arrived in the 19th century. Turkey was the meat of choice for the Victorian middle-classes, and “Christmas itself had evolved from being an occasion for a large feast with hundreds of guests to a more intimate, family-oriented affair”, with vegetables including roast potatoes, parsnips and carrots replacing multiple meats.

“Goose was also widely eaten at Christmas, especially by the working classes,” said Gray on the i news site. But roasting goose “posed problems”, because “ovens were small or non-existent in working-class homes”. Instead, many people paid bakers “a small fee to put their dish of meat into the vast ovens of the bakery”.

Turkey did not become the Christmas norm for all classes until the post-war 1950s, when “images of glorious golden Thanksgiving turkeys from America, a land of glamour and no rationing”, cast a “spell” over Britons.

UK households now consume around 10m Christmas turkeys each year.