I found a fantastic article (in English) about Christmas food in Italy. Italy is great in most respects and cooking is a pillar of its greatness. Like all great cooking traditions the one of Italy is composed of regional varieties, culinary dialects that are rich in vocabulary, expressive in their diversity and covered with layers of history, poverty, affluence and class. Although all classes can now enjoy similar foods, different historic layers remain. Great culinary traditions consists of different types of cooking, diverse by region, separated by class. That puts any major European cooking tradition apart from primitive tribal food of say Estonian humans, sort of, which is bland and uniform and in case of that miserable land consists of potatoes, fat and water mixed with flower. Now their diet is supplemented by Soviet industrial cuisine of manufactured cellulose frankfurters and frozen preparations. At Christmas Estonian lowlifes consume blood sausage (to the British that is blood pudding). Both Christmas and blood sausage are German cultural imports because these were Germans (actually probably also Frisians) who brought civilization and Christianity to what is now Estonia though civilization did not stay for long, the Christianity was always shallow, and the Germans were not divine themselves and so could not endow local soulless savages with any kind human spirit, which is still profoundly lacking in that part of the world. Thus said German Blutwurst (blood sausage) is a delectable delicacy compared to reddish industrial refuse slobbering Estonian tribesmen devour on Christmas eve. On the other hand or rather on the opposite shore, the Finns have a different tradition, at Christmas dinner they savor succulent baked ham . Good stuff. I always thought that there was something inherently unfair in the fact that though those two tribes are linguistic relatives, one group consists almost entirely of lowlifes and the other of more or less reasonable human beings.
Christmas is dead in Russia - at least in the culinary sense it is. The Bolsheviks, who for the most part were not Christians , did everything in their power to wipe off Christmas tradition. With secularization, New Year became the most important holiday, as it is in France. Another thing that did Christmas in was the calendar shift. Soviet state adopted heretical - from the standpoint of the Right Believers, so-called Gregorian calendar while the Church, by then abused and persecuted, clung to the true old one, the calendar that was introduced by Julius Caesar himself, the Julian one. Russian Orthodox Church (the name Russian Orthodox Church appeared only in the year 1943, the new name was Stalin's invention, before 1943 it bore the historic name of Orthodox Catholic Graeco-Russian Church) still uses Julian Calendar but that it turn meant that Christmas now comes after New Year or rather there are now two New Years to deal with in sequence. Because Russians enjoy about three weeks of uninterrupted New Year and Christmas holidays which became vacations, by the time Christmas arrives everyone is already exhausted. But in the past roast goose or duck, usually stuffed with tart apples and sauerkraut, was served at Christmas time. I roast ducks all the time though - no need to wait for Christmas or Hannukah to cook one.
In Bohemia and Moravia, now Czech Republic, Christmas dishes represent a bit mutated tradition from the glorious times of the very Catholic Habsburg (Hapsburg) monarchy. The principal dish here is carp. I did not make any typos. Carps are farmed in the Czech republic and the time before Christmas is when those fish are killed en masse to be served on the Bohemian and Moravian tables. A friend of mine who is not Czech but who lives in Prague says that she knows it's Christmas time by the wail of ambulance sirens. Carp is a bony fish.
Killing of a carp (my digital snapshots, click for larger versions, contact me if you want the huge ones):
The henchman takes the wretched fish to the chopping block for slaughter.
The victim's throat is slit.
Merry Christmas
Here is a beautiful Christmas carol by Hilaire Belloc, a brilliant poet, not just a versifier though he classified himself as such, unfairly, and an insightful author of rare significance and immense power, still under appreciated, much maligned and occasionally slandered (I had the joy of translating two volumes of his poems for "children" into Russian - The Bad Child's Book of Beasts and the classic More Beasts for Worse Children ) here it is, the Sailor's Carol:
Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel!
A Catholic tale I Have to tell!
And a Christian song I have to sing
While all the bells in Arundel ring.
I pray good beef and I pray good beer
This holy night of all the year,
But I pray detestable drink for them
That give no honour to Bethlehem.
May all good fellows that here agree
Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me,
And may all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel!
May all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel!!
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