Goose Fat and Garlic

"Well, the last book, Goose Fat and Garlic , is about the Languedoc, Gascony and the Dordogne. I go to that area of France like a homing pigeon. That middle bit. I live in Wales but I go there for Christmas! Hooray! And I shall take this book with me. Jeanne Strang is a very clever lady. It’s foie gras, it’s goose, it’s wonderful apples. They have a form of baking that is very like the Turkish filo because the Moors got that far up. So they stretch their pastry there. Well, I sent my children to school there, I don’t know… pot au feu, a daube, a slow cooked stew with beef and maybe pork and masses of black red wine and it reduces until you can eat it with a spoon! No. Christmas lunch is less interesting than Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve will be an aioli and plain cooked vegetables, cardoons. It’s meatless. Then you come back after midnight mass and you’re allowed to eat sweets and get pissed and have roast meat. Pheasant is what everyone round about will be eating. Do you know the concept of the treize desserts? It’s a sort of open larder. The Christmas period lasts from the Eve until Twelfth Night and during that time you set out an open larder, almonds and walnuts and dried fruit and apples and pears and oranges and pomegranates and quince and quince paste. There are 12 of those dishes and then you have a sweet bread that symbolises Christ. It’s an ancient tradition with a Christian overlay. You will go and order from the patisserie a beautiful apple tart with this puffy filo pastry, replaced when it’s eaten. Maybe nougat or almond sweeties and marron glacés. Then you tell the children stories about what they all symbolise. There are nice stories about dates looking like the Christ child’s mouth. A little bow. I usually pad around asking people what things mean to them in particular. Yes. And there will be a lot of cabbage, partridges cooked in cabbage. Hare, rabbit, venison, wild boar…"