A History of Christmas Food

Summary

Dan Snow’s History Hit

Episode: A History of Christmas Food

Date: December 18, 2025
Host: Dan Snow
Guest: Food historian Dr. Annie Gray

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Overview: The Tastes and Traditions of Christmases Past

In this festive episode, Dan Snow is joined by renowned food historian Annie Gray for a hands-on journey through Christmas culinary history. Together in the kitchen, they cook, taste, and discuss the evolution of classic Christmas fare like wassail and mince pies. The episode blends quirky anecdotes, historical insights, and practical tips, showing how our holiday food rituals are a medley of ancient customs, Victorian invention, and global influences. Annie and Dan’s lively banter makes it both informative and deeply entertaining—a must-listen for anyone curious about the traditions that shape our Christmas tables.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Layered History of Christmas (03:30–05:06)

• Modern Christmas: Victorian Invention + 1950s Influences
  • Most of what we recognize today as Christmas—turkey, trees, presents, and the general “stress”—stems from the Victorians with sprinkles of twentieth-century commercialization.
  • Dan Snow: “From a point of view of getting drunk, eating lots of food and that idea of cosiness and something to look forward to goes back a long way... The turkey, trees, buying presents—that's mainly Victorian.” [04:36]
• The ‘Eternal’ Winter Festival
  • Winter celebrations centered on fire, feasting, and drink existed long before Christianity—pagan, druidic, and ‘whatever you want to call them’ traditions were co-opted by the Church.
  • The impulse: light a huge fire, eat what you can, forget your woes, and survive the short, miserable days.

2. Christmas Food Origins: Global Influences (05:06–06:10)

• American Imports
  • Turkey and potatoes—now seen as Christmas staples—hail from the Americas and only integrated into Christmas meals post-Columbus.
  • Annie Gray: “Many things we associate with Christmas food are actually from the Americas... turkey and potatoes came in after Columbus.” [05:06]
• Turkey Timeline
  • Turkeys appear in Europe in the 1520s–30s, associated with winter feasts, not just Christmas.
  • Only recently (post-1960s) did turkey become the universal Christmas Day bird in Britain.
  • Other festive birds historically included goose, capon, chicken, and even swan.

3. The 12 Days of Christmas: Feasts and Fasts (06:31–07:47)

• Advent Fasting, Christmas Feasting
  • Advent was a period of fast—stockfish for the poor, luxurious “seafood” (including beaver tails and porpoise) for the rich.
  • Feasting began Christmas Day (or Eve), lasting through Epiphany (Jan 6th): 12 days of abundance.
  • Dan Snow: “Advent was a period of fast... once you get to Christmas itself, the fasting period is over. Wahey! Meat feast. So you’ve got 12 days of feasting.” [06:35]
• Class Divide in Feasting
  • Only the wealthy could afford lavish feasts throughout all twelve days.

4. Wassail: “Christmas in a Cup” (07:49–16:13)

What Is Wassail?

• “A lot of things to a lot of people”—a communal winter punch with ancient roots.
  • Links to Anglo-Saxon customs: “drink hail”—“wassail” call and response.
  • Served hot, receipes varied: apples, brandy, port, beer, cider—whatever was on hand.
  • Rituals for fertility (especially orchards) in certain regions (e.g., Somerset).

Cooking Victorian Wassail (08:38–15:55)

• Recipe Breakdown:
  • Roast apples (stuffed with butter and brown sugar).
  • Prepare an alcoholic base: German hock (white wine of the era), water, cloves, ginger, mace, cinnamon, cardamom, and lots of sugar.
  • Thicken with egg yolks for a “custardy” texture.
  • Pour spiced liquid over apples in a communal bowl; everyone dishes out an apple and plenty of custard.
  • Annie Gray: “This is essentially Victorian health food... protein from the egg, spices for your health, alcohol to kill anything nasty, and the apple—one of your five a day.” [14:20]
  • The process, with mishaps (broken spoons, makeshift kitchen tools), is playful:
    • Annie Gray: “Just broken the wooden spoon. I was given that wooden spoon by my team at History Hit for having the worst performing social media post in the whole of the year.” [10:17]
    • Dan Snow: “Well, I suppose now you’ve got the worst performing wooden spoon.” [10:27]

Tasting & Toasting

• Notable Moment/Quote:
  • Dan Snow: “By the time you’ve drunk it, you won’t care anymore!” [13:26]
  • Annie Gray: “Ah, it’s Christmas in a cup. Feel ready to go.” [15:59]

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5. The Mince Pie: A Savory-Sweet Evolution (19:20–34:13)

From Meat Pie to Treat

• Mincemeat Origins:
  • First mince pies (Tudor/Medieval) were a third beef/mutton, a third suet, a third dried fruit—plus sugar (then used as a spice).
  • Early pies blurred lines between sweet and savory—a mark of luxury and ostentatious feasting.
  • Over time, the meat content dwindled (a little meat in 19th-century pies, then usually just suet today).
  • Dan Snow: “Early mincemeats were indeed minced meat—meat, suet, dried fruit... sugar was a spice.” [20:12]

Victorian Recipe Cook-Along

• Annie & Dan cook Eliza Acton’s 1845 “meat meat” mincemeat:
  • Minced roast beef
  • Suet (“the hard fat around the kidneys of a mammal”)
  • Currants, raisins, candied peel, lemon zest
  • Sugar, salt, nutmeg, ginger, sherry, brandy
  • All encased in buttery puff pastry
• Class Differences:
  • The recipe is solidly middle-class (Eliza Acton was the “real” Mrs. Beeton). The working class would likely buy pies, not make them (no home oven).
  • Annie Gray: “No point making mincemeat just for a few people… this is just one among many dishes on the table that would have screamed wealth.” [24:15]

Notable Quotes/Moments

• Oliver Cromwell and the “War on Christmas” (22:02–23:58):

  • Dan Snow: “No, they didn’t ban Christmas. They did legislate against what they saw as its excesses… Christmas had become associated with rioting, football, the working classes getting drunk, having sex with loads of different people.” [22:15]
  • “Christmas was cancelled” became cultural shorthand, but actual bans and crackdowns were more nuanced—class and religion were at the heart of it.
  • “Culture wars.” [23:58]

• Dramatic Boar’s Head Feasts (25:23–26:47):

  • Preparation was epic—sometimes required importing boar from Germany if you were Queen Victoria.
  • Annie describes the lengthy multi-week process for making an authentic boar’s head centerpiece—a symbol of ostentation in festive dining.

Baking & Tasting

• Playful moments as Annie and Dan assemble the pies. Dan admits to over-stuffing.
• First Bite Reactions:
  • Annie Gray: “Oh, that’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. It’s not—the texture is great, isn’t it?” [33:56]
  • Dan Snow: “Meaty minced meat has got depth of flavor, texture, complexity. It’s just... a different ball game.” [34:13]
  • Discussion on how modern mince pies are a shadow of their complex, meaty ancestors.

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6. Victorian Christmas: Reinvention and Nostalgia (29:17–31:33)

• Restoring Christmas:
  • The Industrial Revolution, urbanization, and nostalgia led Victorians to ‘restore’ Christmas as a season of hospitality, charity, and overt celebration.
  • Dickens and Prince Albert are often credited, but many others helped revive the traditions (Albert “imported” trees, but Christmas trees predated him in the UK; Dickens gets “less credit than he deserves”).
  • Annie Gray: “Today, we think of Dickens and Albert as having single-handedly invented Christmas because those are the iconic figures... It’s just not true.” [30:14]
  • Even Victorians thought “real” Christmas had been even earlier—Tudor nostalgia!

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7. Reflections and What We Should (and Shouldn’t) Bring Back (34:30–35:40)

• Dan’s Wish-List for Christmas Revival:
  • Restore the 12 days of Christmas, culminating in a “Twelfth Cake” (not Christmas cake, which “peters out with a whimper”).
  • More variety—ditch the turkey-and-brussels default, enjoy mince pies all season, experiment with flavors, and embrace diversity of food.
  • Dan Snow: "Christmas should be what we want it to be and not what we’re told it should be. Get rid of the shoulds. Have only what we want.” [35:35]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If we really liked turkey, wouldn’t we eat it on more than just the 25th of December?”
  —Dan Snow, reflecting on food habits [32:56]

• “Eat mince pies throughout the whole season and have 15 different types of mincemeat and drink wassail and... have loads of different types of food on the table.”
  —Dan Snow [35:35]

• Annie, you have changed my Christmas from this day forward. Like, you’re like the ghosts of Christmas past, present, future. You’ve reintroduced me to wassail, to these proper mince pies.”
  —Dan Snow, after tasting [34:30]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:30: The true origins of Christmas—tradition vs. Victorian invention
• 05:06: Turkey and potatoes: American imports & food seasonality
• 06:31: Advent fasts, Christmas feasts, and 12 days of indulgence
• 07:49–16:13: Cooking, history, and tasting of wassail
• 19:20–34:13: Mince pie history, class, and live cooking/tasting session
• 22:02: Cromwell and the “banning” of Christmas—myth and reality
• 25:23: The lost art of the boar’s head feast
• 29:17: Victorian reinvention of Christmas—Dickens, nostalgia, and more
• 34:30–35:40: Food traditions to revive, and a call for variety and personal meaning

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Conclusion

This episode paints a vivid, fascinating portrait of Christmas culinary history, reminding listeners that today’s traditions are built on centuries of adaptability, class tensions, and delicious experimentation. Annie Gray’s enthusiasm and encyclopedic knowledge, paired with Dan’s wit and curiosity, make the story of wassail and mince pies as appealing as the foods themselves. Their key takeaway: ditch the culinary “shoulds” and embrace a Christmas full of variety, tradition, and above all, enjoyment.

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Book plug:

• Annie Gray, At Christmas We Feast—for more on festive food history and recipes. [35:44]

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(Summary skips all advertisements, sponsors, and non-content segments as requested.)

Transcript

[Dan Snow]

Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree. Zoey, this thing weighs a ton. Drew Ski, lift with your legs, man. Santa. Santa, did you get my letter?

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[Dan Snow]

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[Annie Gray]

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[Dan Snow]

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[Annie Gray]

That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies, right, Mrs. Claus?

[Dan Snow]

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[Annie Gray]

Nice. My side of the tree is slipping.

[Verizon Advertiser]

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[American Red Cross Announcer]

Visit t mobile.com this holiday season, millions of families will pack their bags, load up the car, and head off for a family vacation. But not every trip is going to be somewhere fun. The American Red Cross responds to about 7,000 emergencies during the holiday season alone, from home fires to natural disasters, providing families a safe place to go when the unthinkable happens. But they can't do it without your support. Please [e-mail] okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line.

[Dan Snow]

But first.

[American Red Cross Announcer]

There the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.

[Annie Gray]

Good tidings, good tidings. History hit listeners. Now, before we go any further, I need to let you know that you can watch this episode on YouTube. It's very modern. It's very exciting. You can watch me and the food historian Annie Gray making Tudor mince pies and wassail punch in my kitchen as we talk about Christmas food through the ages. And you importantly, can learn how to make them yourself. It is a truly festive feast for the eyes as well as the ears. I've actually used these in real life. These have improved and enriched and delicionized my family Christmases. So I hope they're useful for you if you want to watch this, please check out the link in the show notes. Otherwise, proceed without doing anything. And you're about to listen to this classic Christmas episode from our archive. Enjoy. Hi, everyone. Welcome down snow's history. I am standing in a kitchen next to food historian legend Annie Gray. Hello. And today, because it's Christmas, we are cooking the most amazing mid winter fare, Wassail, which is a beautiful alcoholic punch and proper mince pies. Annie's going to take us through those dishes, tell us how to make them, tell us all about Christmas's past and how we ended up with the Christmas we have today. Enjoy. Annie Gray, great to have you back on the show.

[Dan Snow]

Great to be back.

[Annie Gray]

Is Christmas one of those things that feels eternal but like most other traditions, just basically made up by the Victorians?

[Dan Snow]

Yes and no. I would say most of the modern Christmas certainly was made up by the Victorians with a kind of sprinkling of 1950s as well. The idea of Christmas goes back a lot further. So we look out the window here today and it's absolutely beautiful. It's a glorious sunshiny day. It's freezing though. But the most normal thing in the British winter is pretty manky, pretty rainy, pretty miserable. If you're back in the medieval period or before then and you're a rural farmer, it's got the additional glory of mud. Most of your cattle has been slaughtered. You can't go out in the field, it's boring. You're poor, it's hideous. So of course the best thing to do is to light a huge fire, get really drunk and eat what you can do and try and forget about your woes. And that is something that you see universally throughout northern climes. Hideous, foul winter. Look, it's really short days. Let's get drun and light a big fire and forget about everything. And then when the Christian church comes along and starts to adopt a lot of those early pagan druid, call it what you will, festivals, they go great. Christmas. Okay, fine, let's stick it there. It's fine. We want a big celebration. So all these things come together and you end up with something. Call it what you will. For a lot of cultures in the middle of winter, which is an excuse to get drunk and eat lots of food. So from a point of view of getting drunk, eating lots of food and that idea of cosiness and something to look forward to goes back a long way from the point of view of turkey, Christmas trees, buying loads of presents for people, decorating things and being really Stressed out. That's mainly Victorian.

[Annie Gray]

And as I learned the podcast the other day, many things that we associate with Christmas foods, all actually from the Americas, things like turkey and potatoes. So it must have been post Christopher Columbus, anyway.

[Dan Snow]

Well, yeah, I mean the idea of lots of food, that's the kind of pre Columbian Christmas, if you like. But I mean even say things like turkey, potatoes, not really associated with really hard with Christmas until quite late on anyway. I mean, turkey comes in in 1520s, 1530s. We start to see breeding pairs come in. We start to see farms for turkeys in France in the 1530s. They're mentioned in sumptuary laws later on. So turkey was there. Turkey was associated with Christmas, but it was associated with Christmas because it was big, impressive and in season, in the winter, it wasn't just Christmas, it was a festive, a winter seasonal dish. It wasn't the thing you ate on Christmas Day. Universally, really until the 1960s and I think today as well, we tend to forget that birds like that poultry are seasonal. So goose, capon, even chicken and turkey as well. And swan, which was another not popular feast bird, but certainly a feast bird that was present.

[Annie Gray]

I am not a big fan of swan. Have you tried swan?

[Dan Snow]

I had it in a pie once, but there was a little swan in the pie.

[Annie Gray]

Did you get the Queen's permission to do that?

[Dan Snow]

No. Apparently swans crash land on roads thinking they're rivers sometimes, and as long as you take them along to a vet and the RSPB is able to check the tag on the leg sometimes some people are then able to take them home.

[Annie Gray]

And what are the 12 days of Christmas and are they important food wise?

[Dan Snow]

They were very important for the medieval period and for those that were wealthy enough to afford to eat well throughout the whole period. So your traditional 12 days running from the 25th or the evening of the 24th, depending on who you speak to, through to the epiphany. So the fifth or the sixth, depending on who you speak to generally, in the UK it's the sixth and that was the period of Christmas. So the idea was that Advent was a period of fast. This is the point where we were obviously Catholic still pre Reformation. So as with all fasting, if you were poor, you'd be eating stockfish, which you would repeatedly hit with a hammer for days and days and days and soak and then hate it and it would maggoty and awful and you force yourself to eat it because you're not allowed to eat anything that comes from an animal. And if you're Wealthy, you're going to feast on porpoise and seal and beaver's tails, because they're seafood, apparently, puffing things like that. And you're not really going to suffer any shortages. You're going to be absolutely fine. And then once you get to Christmas itself, the fasting period is over. Wahey. Meat feast. So you've got 12 days of feasting. And that was the idea that you'd had your fast, now you feasted, and once you got to the sixth, you went back to your normal rhythm, where about half the year really were fish days and the other half were meat days. So gargantuan amounts of feasting, if you were wealthy enough to afford it.

[Annie Gray]

Right. What do you want me to do first, boss?

[Dan Snow]

Well, I think we should start with the drink.

[Annie Gray]

Oh, the drink, yeah.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, so we're going to make some wassail.

[Annie Gray]

What's that?

[Dan Snow]

Well, it's a lot of things to a lot of different people, including the good folks of Walthamstow, who I'm told go around today in a modern fashion with plastic bowls asking for booze.

[American Red Cross Announcer]

Really?

[Dan Snow]

Yes. And to some people it is about fertility and orchards, and to other people it's about mulling beer. And whoever you ask will come up with a different definition, but they'll all agree it's very old.

[Annie Gray]

Okay. So some people just get a big bowl and people just pour whatever they have got in it.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. I mean, Warsaw is one of those things that comes from the medieval era, where it was even before that, actually there was an Anglo Saxon drink and drink response. So you would shout, drink ale. And everyone would go, was ale. And lots and lots of reenactors today love doing that with their big tankards.

[Annie Gray]

How do you want me to start? What do I do?

[Dan Snow]

We're going to cook a 19th century recipe because there aren't very many recipes for wassail, and this one is from the 1890s. We're starting with some apples, so I think we'll do half the recipes. So if you can just core without breaking the skin.

[Annie Gray]

Do we have a special corer or am I just using a knife?

[Dan Snow]

You're going to use a knife.

[Annie Gray]

Okay.

[Dan Snow]

I would have got you a piece of reindeer bone so that you could go straight through, but I didn't have it. A lot of wassail recipes in heavily inverted commas involve brandy, port, beer, whatever.

[Annie Gray]

It comes to hand.

[Dan Snow]

And a lot of the modern ones anyway are hot. And this one is a hot wassail. And they may have been hot in the past. They May have involved beer, they may have involved cider, they may have involved anything.

[Annie Gray]

Sounds quite loose to me.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, it's really just a thing people drink in the autumn and in the winter. So it's sort of lots of different things.

[Annie Gray]

There we go.

[Dan Snow]

History in action. Right now.

[Annie Gray]

History in action. This is it. Okay. What do you want me to cord that?

[Dan Snow]

So we're gonna put that on this nice foil sheet here. The main thing is just that there's no pips and things that you don't want to eat in there.

[Annie Gray]

Okay. How many are we doing?

[Dan Snow]

We're gonna do three.

[Annie Gray]

Here we go.

[Dan Snow]

I mean, obviously was. Ales are a celebratory thing. So ideally we should probably do about 10 and make it to feed 30 people.

[Annie Gray]

But the whole of team history here, we'll just have it ourselves.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, exactly.

[Annie Gray]

There we go.

[Dan Snow]

So I've made a bit of a.

[Annie Gray]

Balls up at this point.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, well, it's all gonna end up being cooked anyway, so let's not worry too much about it. You can't get started.

[Annie Gray]

That's true. No one can see it. By the way, everyone listening to this. It's absolutely brilliant what I'm doing.

[Dan Snow]

That was a. If you go to Somerset today, you'll find that Wasdale is built.

[Annie Gray]

Just broken the wooden spoon. I was given that wooden spoon by my team at History Hit for having the worst performing social media post in the whole of the year.

[Dan Snow]

Well, I suppose now you've got the worst performing wooden spoon.

[Annie Gray]

Yeah.

[Dan Snow]

Ever.

[Annie Gray]

There you go. Right. Beautifully done.

[Dan Snow]

Right, we're gonna put a little bit of butter into the middle of each of these.

[Annie Gray]

Why not? I've got an oven that is pre 215. Is that right? Baking tray?

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. Hang on. There's some sugar here.

[Annie Gray]

Sugar. There's some sugar here. Or brown. Do we want brown or white?

[Dan Snow]

Brown is fine. Brown's probably slightly better flavour. Let's put a bit of sugar into each.

[Annie Gray]

God. Not messing about. We haven't even added the alcohol yet. Jeepers creepers.

[Dan Snow]

Right, stick those in the oven and we'll roast them until they go all soft and squidgy and nobody.

[Annie Gray]

Okay.

[Dan Snow]

Or you could drop them. I'll just drop them in the oven. Yeah, obviously your oven was really clean to lie.

[Annie Gray]

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, what are we plunging into next?

[Dan Snow]

Next we're going to make the alcoholic liquid that we will eventually pour onto our apples.

[Annie Gray]

Okay.

[Dan Snow]

Which in this case very, very late Victorian. You know, the wine of choice for your late Victorian dude would be a nice German hock.

[Annie Gray]

Really?

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. All this French wine, it's all new, it's good, quite like it. But really what we want is a German hock. The kind of. Well, it's basically blue naan. And you can use blue naan for this recipe if you can still get it. So we've got a bottle of hock here and we're going to put that in our pan.

[Annie Gray]

So I've never heard of hock. It's a soft and fruity Deutsche Landwein. Rhine. It's on the river Rhine.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. It's not dissimilar to a Riesling or a sort of Sylvana, Those kind of things that we would. That go, oh, Alsacean wine. We like those. Hock is just a little bit further along. Queen Victoria had a vineyard in the area named after her. It's really, really popular as a wine for the Victorians. And it still is slightly less alcoholic than some wines as well, because it's northern. So, yeah, that one's 9%, so it's.

[Annie Gray]

Not going to kill us. Where do you want this?

[Dan Snow]

I would like that in that pan, please, along with 150 milliliters of water.

[Annie Gray]

All the whole thing. Yeah.

[Dan Snow]

We then want cloves, ginger, mace, cinnamon and cardamom. So lots of spice.

[Annie Gray]

Okay. Cloves, cinnamon.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, about half what's there.

[Annie Gray]

Some of that very scientific. We're just throwing it all in.

[Dan Snow]

You know, the Victorians did measure things quite a lot, but of course, if you knew what you were doing, you didn't need to.

[Annie Gray]

I guess the spirit of wassail is. It's quite loose and it's quite relaxed.

[Dan Snow]

As I say, there really aren't any written recipes before about the 18th century. And even when they are written down, they vary. Yeah. And spices vary. Some people's spices are really, really strong. Some people's spices have spent six months on a ship getting across from the. Indeed. I always think just use a bit more if you're not in. Sure, that will do.

[Annie Gray]

Okay. That looks really disgusting.

[Dan Snow]

Hang on, I'm finished.

[Annie Gray]

Light brown now. It's got various bits of spice floating in it. Lots of particles. There's a kind of scum forming on top of it.

[Dan Snow]

It's good. It's Christmas. By the time you drunk it, you won't care anymore. So chuck that on the heat.

[Annie Gray]

There we go.

[Dan Snow]

I'm just gonna add a bit more sugar.

[Annie Gray]

Not all of it, a bit more sugar.

[Dan Snow]

Not gonna add it all.

[Annie Gray]

That is like a basin of sugar.

[Dan Snow]

Sugar had really come down in price by the 1890s and you could get beet sugar and the tax was gone. This is all about and being hyperactive.

[Annie Gray]

Wow. Brush your teeth, kids.

[Dan Snow]

So what we're going to do now, once this gets to boiling point, is we're effectively going to make a custard. A lot of sauces in the past were thickened with egg yolks. It makes them very velvety and very lovely. And, I mean, corn flour is easier, but egg yolks are, I think, a nicer texture. If I give this.

[Annie Gray]

Do you want me to heat that up, Whisk?

[Dan Snow]

Not yet, no. Because otherwise we'll get scrambled eggs.

[Annie Gray]

So the kind of brownie liquid is going a little bit thicker and a bit more yellow when you add it to the egg yolk.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. So what we're going to end up with is a pale fawn liquid. I'm going to add a bit of heat to this in a minute and just thicken it up slightly. And then once that is a nice thin custard, we're going to remove our apples from the oven, put them in the bottom of the big bowl and then this gets poured on top. And the idea is that everybody who's drinking Norwal Sale gets an apple and some of your thin alcoholic custard, which means that you're getting protein from the egg and you're getting spices, which are obviously very good for you. Alcohol to kill off anything that's nasty and make you feel fuzzy and delightful. And the apple, which is obviously one of your five a day. So this is essentially Victorian health food. Right, let's have the apples.

[Annie Gray]

Whoa. Hot in this ear, Robin, isn't it?

[Dan Snow]

Come on, come on.

[Annie Gray]

Begin to regret this Christmas jumper. That's hot. Yikes. There goes the good stuff. The liquid flowing down, submerging the apples. Here we go. So apples are now floating. Think of the most wonderful Dickensian scene you can imagine. Apples floating in a great dish with lovely warm liquid giving off an aroma.

[Dan Snow]

So I think we need some of this each.

[Annie Gray]

Oh, thank you.

[Dan Snow]

So there's some squidgy apple and some liquid spiced eggyhock.

[Annie Gray]

The smell's gone from student throw everything that's in the house into a plastic tub booze to, like, really quite sophisticated smell.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah.

[Annie Gray]

I never doubted you. Obviously. What do we shout when we drink this?

[Dan Snow]

Drink ale.

[Annie Gray]

Drink ale, Jose Ale. Cheers. Ah, it's Christmas in a cup. Feel ready to go.

[Dan Snow]

Tell me that. Drinking this for breakfast, Christmas Day. I'll tell you what, basically a boiled egg, isn't it?

[Annie Gray]

As you say, very wholesome you're listening to Dan Snow's history here. There's more to come. This episode of Dan Snows History is brought to you by Momentous. Now I've started taking creatine on a daily basis and it's quickly become essential for me. I feel clearer, stronger and I recover faster when I'm consistent. And I went with Momentous because their quality and testing gave me real confidence in what I was taking. I remember taking creatine back when I was rowing and now I wish I'd had this. It's so easy. Now they've got the new bite sized Lemon Lime Creatine Chews. No mixing or measuring. Just a quick chew and you're done. It's the simplest way to stay on track. And creatine isn't just for muscle. It supports strength, focus, recovery, healthy aging, which I need, and cognitive performance. If you want creatine made easy, check out the creatine. Choose from Momentous Right now, Momentous is offering our listeners up to 35% off your first order with promo code SNOW. S N O W. Use it folks. Go to livemomentous.com and use promo code SNOW for up to 35 off your first order. That's live momentous.com promo code SNOW.

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[American Red Cross Announcer]

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[Dan Snow]

Cozy Tommy John pajamas you're buying?

[Annie Gray]

Paige desorbo they are Tommy John.

[Dan Snow]

And yes, I'm stocking up because they make the best holiday gifts. So generous. Well, I'm a generous girly, especially when.

[Annie Gray]

It Comes to me.

[Dan Snow]

So I'm grabbing the softest sleepwear, comfiest underwear and best fitting loungewear. So nothing for your bestie? Of course. I'm getting my dad, Tommy John.

[Annie Gray]

Oh, and you, of course.

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[Dan Snow]

Easy. Exactly. Cozy, comfy, everyone's happy gift everyone on your list, including yourself with Tommy John and get 40% off site wide right [e-mail] comfort.

[Annie Gray]

Right, what are we going to eat with our delicious wassail?

[Dan Snow]

Well, I think we've got to go for mince pies, haven't we?

[Annie Gray]

The ultimate. The ultimate Christmas season.

[Dan Snow]

One of the actual most venerable foods of Christmas. Yes, it does go back a long way. So mince meat, mince pies, Christmas pies as they were often known, although Christmas pies also meant something else. Late medieval, Tudor, etc.

[Annie Gray]

Was there meat in a mince pie?

[Dan Snow]

Yes.

[Annie Gray]

All right.

[Dan Snow]

And we're starting with it. Oh, we're actually going to do making Eliza Acton's meat meat, which is from 1845. And we are going to start with the Miss British of meats, which is of course roast beef. And we want about half a pound, so 225 grams in new money, which is probably about half of that which you are going to mince up, please.

[Annie Gray]

Okay, stand by.

[Dan Snow]

So the original minced meats were indeed minced meat and other things. If you look at Tudor recipes, you've got about a third meat in there and then a third suet and the other third is dried fruit.

[Annie Gray]

I obviously know this, but there might be people listening or watching who don't know what suet is.

[Dan Snow]

Suet is a hard fat that sits around the kidneys of a mammal. You have suet, I have suet, and cows have a lot of suet. So it's usually cow suet. And what's happens is you chop that fat up and because it's a hard fat, it behaves in really interesting ways. And one of the things it does is it gives a really lovely mouth feel, very velvety feel to things when you eat them. Another thing is it makes very light pastry. And another thing is that it melts very pleasingly. So it gives mincemeat that kind of beautiful texture that you associate, I suppose, with mincemeat.

[Annie Gray]

Who discovered that? Okay, so just mincing is like what.

[Dan Snow]

Cubing it like very, very fine dice.

[Annie Gray]

Yeah.

[Dan Snow]

So we're going to chop that up nice and small. A lot of the early mince pies used beef, some used mutton. There are versions with Fish and eggs for fast dating.

[Annie Gray]

So they were savoury. It was a savoury dish.

[Dan Snow]

It was a mixture. The demarcation that we've got today between sweet and savoury wasn't one that was used so much in the past, because sugar was so expensive, certainly in the Tudor period, that it was used almost as a spice. So, of course, in the 17th century, Britain started to colonize the West Indies, brought in slave labour, that whole awful part of our history starts, and sugar become a bit cheaper. But at this point, so Tudor, medieval mincemeats, very much sugar being used as a spice. And what you see throughout the next two or three hundred years is the meat quantity slowly dwindles. So by the time you get to the 19th century, which is the mincemeat we're making, you've got very little meat left in them, just enough to give it a bit of a back note. And then by the 20th century, most mincemeats are meat free, but not vegetarian, because they still have Suetone.

[Annie Gray]

And while we're cooking this, no conversation about Christmas and the history of Christmas is complete without asking about what is the reality of Oliver Cromwell, The Puritans, during the Republic, did they ban Christmas?

[Dan Snow]

No, they didn't ban Christmas. They did legislate against what they saw as its excesses. So there is no legislation to ban mince pies, not least because mince pies were not actually associated with Christmas as so much the whole festive season. What happened was that the Puritans, and especially the Scottish Presbyterians, felt that Christmas was a really bad thing. They did have a point. Christmas had become associated with rioting, with football, with the working classes, getting really drunk, having sex with loads of different people. I mean, just Christmas had become.

[Annie Gray]

Sounds rubbish.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, yeah, terrible. Very commercialized as well. Too many orange sellers profiteering off the back of the demand for oranges. They felt that it was both pagan in that really it would just been adopted by the Christian church and had never really changed, but at the same time, papist. So all the bad things at once. And let's not kind of examine that too much, but they felt it was generally bad. So the trouble is it was liked a lot by the English. Liked a lot as a celebration, liked a lot as a thing to get through winter. And the Scottish didn't really celebrate it. And the Presbyterians in Scotland, the Calvinists in Scotland in particular, really wanted to ban it. Crookes point came in 1644, when Christmas fell on a day that was supposed to be not Any form of religious day. It was a normal day. So, unfortunately, the English Parliament was forced to join the Scottish Parliament in banning Christmas Day as a celebration. I mean, it became a real touch point. And loads of pamphlets were published for and against Christmas. And it was a really, really big cause for concern that it was almost as if all of the arguments over what was religion, what was the Puritan state, what was the state of being, what was a moral person, or all of those kind of coalesced. So there's a lot of stuff written about Christmas and Christmas became a focus beyond, in some ways, what it really was.

[Annie Gray]

Culture wars.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, well, exactly. You know, Christmas was cancelled. So. No, there were incidences of some people being beaten up by soldiers. There were diarists. Don Evelyn was one who tried to celebrate Christmas and ended up in the cells or being. It's all very. Yes, there was. Yes, there wasn't. But either way, we restored it in 1660 and then everyone forgot about it for 100 years and all the bon tom went, oh, I don't think I like it after all. Contrary as ever. Right, so that's your meat, your base, that is your meat and your minced meat. And it is minced. So it is minced meat.

[Annie Gray]

I've minced that meat. I'm very pleased with it.

[Dan Snow]

You've minced it well. And now we want to put in some currants and some raisins.

[Annie Gray]

Okay.

[Dan Snow]

Handfulot.

[Annie Gray]

All of it.

[Dan Snow]

Well, we want about a pound. That's probably middle. Is that.

[Annie Gray]

Wow.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, Good old raisins. Then we want some peel. Candied peel. So we're going to use the candied peel that's there. There's no point in making mincemeat just for a few people, is there? So I'm going to just grate the zest of these two lemons as well, to go in. I mean, this is just one among many dishes on the table that would have screamed wealth. So you've got all that roast meat, you've got your turkey, your swan, your peacock, whatever else is going on. You've got a whole tradition as well, around pork cookery brawn, which in the early part of history was kind of half a pig, like literally a vertical slice down the pig that had been rolled and boiled. And then, of course, the boar's head, which we sing about in the Boar's Head Carol, which was also difficult, a.

[Annie Gray]

Boar'S head being a pig's head.

[Dan Snow]

Well, boar's head was a boar's head until we ate all the boars and Then once we'd driven the boars to extinction, if you were really wealthy, or Queen Victoria, who also was very wealthy, you could get a boar brought in from Germany. But if you weren't wealthy enough to get hold of a boar, you would do it with a pig's head, with which you would make look like a boar and you would tart it up. I mean, it's a sort of two week cook, this thing. And there are recipes in Victorian cookery books for how you get your pig's head. You have to get it cut back at the second vertebrae. You then bone it, you brine it in red wine for two weeks, turning the skin every day. You sew the skin shut, you stuff it, you put. I mean, it's amazing, these things. You then swaddle it, you boil it for seven hours in more red wine, you take it out, it looks having made it awful at that point. And then you pipe it with lard or you put pastry across its forehead or you put your family crest on it, you perk its ears up. I mean, it looks incredible when you've finished it, but it is so much work and it feeds a lot of people. Normally, at least by the Edwardian period, you would get a caterer to do it and there were rumours that people would kind of cheat and use soot to colour it and things like that. So it's one of those things where you have to have a reputable boar's head.

[Annie Gray]

So supplier, really typical Queen Victoria, importing a German boar and boning it. I'm literally on fire at the moment.

[Dan Snow]

I think the boar's head was a bit tastier than Albert though, don't you?

[Annie Gray]

Okay, what's. What's next? Lemon. So including skin, everything.

[Dan Snow]

So these have been boiled. One of the really, really lovely things in the past we just don't do a lot now is boiling entire lemons, mushing them up, making them into stuff.

[Annie Gray]

Where do you go full of recipes? Do you go to like posh houses, archives of posh houses or where are they all kept?

[Dan Snow]

They're not often in the archives of posh houses because a lot of the houses, when the families gave their documents to archives, they took out all the stuff they thought wasn't interesting.

[Annie Gray]

Oh.

[Dan Snow]

So they've kept in all the things about Lord so and so buying furniture and all his hunt books and left out all the stuff about where they bought milk from. So it's a mixture, really. Lots of manuscript books. There's a lot online. The welcome Collection got some really, really good Stuff online. And then we're going to add in a little bit of salt and some nutmeg and some ginger.

[Annie Gray]

Okay.

[Dan Snow]

All of which is in there. So let's put in some of that.

[Annie Gray]

Okay, folks, listening at home, I've just put a huge amount of sugar in here. I gotta be honest. You can no longer see the ingredients. There's so much sugar covering it more.

[Dan Snow]

Yep.

[Annie Gray]

Okay.

[Dan Snow]

And stop. See how exact that was?

[Annie Gray]

Very exact.

[Dan Snow]

And then we're gonna put in some sherry. Sherry and then some brandy.

[Annie Gray]

Get the brandy going in there. Napoleon cognac.

[Dan Snow]

Right. You can use any booze for this. Actually, you can use. I've done it with port, I've done it with ginger wine. I've done it with all sorts of things. So then if you give that a good old mix.

[Annie Gray]

Mix with my broken spoon. Oh, my gosh.

[Dan Snow]

See, when you mix it, you realise there's not that much sugar compared to ingredients.

[Annie Gray]

No, not at all. Not at all.

[Dan Snow]

Doesn't that look so much nicer than a modern mincemeat? There's no brand goo goo coming off it.

[Annie Gray]

I agree, I agree. This does look really delicious. The extraordinary mixture of meat, currants, sultanas, raisins and suet apples. Oh, is the suet coming in?

[Dan Snow]

Yeah.

[Annie Gray]

Okay, what's next?

[Dan Snow]

Next we're going to put them into pastry cases.

[Annie Gray]

Let's do it.

[Dan Snow]

And I thought instead of doing big ones like the Tudors or little raised pies, which would be a lot of work, we would go full on Victorian and use puff pastry. So in the miracle that is the.

[Annie Gray]

Modern world, it comes pretty rare.

[Dan Snow]

It does provide what I would say, if you're buying it, always, always buy the stuff that's all butter. Otherwise it tastes horrible.

[Annie Gray]

I'll cut the pastry out.

[Dan Snow]

Go for it. We've got.

[Annie Gray]

I used to do this for my grandma. We made cookies every Christmas.

[Dan Snow]

A mug which should be big enough to do the sides and then the glass should be big enough to do the lids.

[Annie Gray]

Okay, ready? So what is it? What's going on with the Victorians? Why is it we seem to think so? Christmas goes into overdrive at that time.

[Dan Snow]

There are lots of different factors, really, but what you see is around the 1840s, there's a real feeling of the idea that Christmas has kind of lost the plot. It's been dwindling. The Georgians weren't particularly into Christmas, or at least the fashionable society wasn't particularly into Christmas. They thought it was a bit of a dreary thing to kind of have to visit people and it's winter and fine with the meals and the feasting and all that stuff, but the rest of it, bit sort of plebeian and excuse to get drunk. And it started dwindling. So you see the number of bank holidays in a year dwindle. You see the 12 days dwindle down. Obviously it's the industrial revolution or the first phase of it. So there's not so many people needing to sort of sit on their ass all of the whole of December because they work in factories. And obviously also agrarian husbandry has moved on.

[Annie Gray]

So.

[Dan Snow]

So you can now keep your cattle a lot more throughout winter and things like that. So there's this feeling in the 1840s that Christmas has lost its way and that we're going to lose it, it's going to go the way of all things. And lots and lots of people at that point are saying this is not right. Christmas should be about hospitality. There's a real sense of nostalgia. You know, today we're all about, oh, the Victorians. That's when Christmas was great. The Victorians thought it was great in the Tudor period. So they decided that actually it should be put back to what they thought of as Christmas, which was about hospitality and charity. And you didn't want to like bring four people into your house, they like to steal something, but you did want to give to charity and that kind of thing. And I suppose today we think of Charles Dickens and Prince Albert as having single handedly invented Christmas because those are the iconic figures that are always talked about. But it's not true. Dickens was one of many writers who talked about it, he was just one of the most popular. And Albert gets all of the glory for inventing the Christmas tree, which was a German tradition that was present in this country already in the shape of, of German bakeries. Queen Charlotte, who had a yew Tree in the 1780s at Kew, you know, let's not give any more credit to Albert than he needs and definitely give no more credit to Dickens than he deserves, which is less than he probably should get because I'm not a fond of Dickens.

[Annie Gray]

You're not?

[Dan Snow]

I find Dickens women disturbingly awful and Dickens himself disturbingly awful, to be fair.

[Annie Gray]

So you're loading the mince into the pies.

[Dan Snow]

I am.

[Annie Gray]

Should I put a lid on?

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. I'm got a terrible habit of overstuffing my mince. Mince pies, by the way.

[Annie Gray]

So just place the lid like that.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, give it. I'll give it.

[Annie Gray]

There you go. Now this is all Classes. Because you mentioned that there's different things for different classes. In terms of what's going in the mint spice. This is quite a.

[Dan Snow]

This is a kind of universal recipe, really. I mean, there's a lot of booze, a lot of spice, a lot of meat in this, and it's quite nice meat. And Eliza Acton's very much aiming at a middle class audience. She was really, I suppose, in some ways, the quote unquote, real Mrs. Beaton. As in, everybody always thinks Mrs. Beaton was this iconic Victorian cook who wrote about what to do for the middle class housewife. But most of Beaton's recipes were plagiarized from Eliza Actin. And Eliza Acton's a really good recipe. So this is solidly kind of middle class, gentry level. If you're working class, you would probably buy your mince pies because you wouldn't have an oven. But the aristocratic tables, I always think, have got a lot to love. And obviously they have because they're incredibly wealthy. But you would get soup and fish and loads of different meats and loads of different vegetable dishes and a huge amount of choice. And one of the things that's really interesting about Christmas's past is how varied the meals were, bearing in mind that now we are effectively told that we should all be eating turkey and Brussels sprouts and pigs in blankets, which are really quite modern. And there's not a lot of variety. I mean, there is variety, but it's not what we're shown in the media. You look at recipes, you look at menus, even in the 1930s, and they're suggesting beef and Yorkshire pudding or a chicken or whatever else it is. So I always think, stop being told what to eat. If we really liked turkey, wouldn't we eat it on more than just the 25th of December? Let's pop those in the oven.

[Annie Gray]

Right, let's go. This is the big moment. Here we go.

[Dan Snow]

Give it 10 minutes. 15 minutes.

[Annie Gray]

10 minutes.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. Drink some more Warzale and relax.

[Annie Gray]

Okay, 15 minutes is up.

[Dan Snow]

Smells ready to mix.

[Annie Gray]

We're gonna look in there. Oh, my goodness me, folks, these look like little mince pie. Vol au vens. That is amazing.

[Dan Snow]

Sorry, cook's hanging.

[Annie Gray]

Right, we're gonna try a pie.

[Dan Snow]

Watch out, they will be really hot.

[Annie Gray]

I can't resist, though. I can't stop myself.

[Dan Snow]

And I'm just giving you the warning. When you burn, I'm not responsible.

[Annie Gray]

It's really hot. It's really hot. Oh, That the most delicious thing I've ever eaten in my Life. It's not. The texture is great, isn't it?

[Dan Snow]

Meaty minced meat has got depth of flavor, texture, complexity. It's just. It's a different ball game. You know, it's like instant coffee versus, you know, real coffee. There's a space in most people's lives for instant coffee, but when you have the real thing. Yeah.

[Annie Gray]

Annie, you have changed my Christmas from this day forward. Like, you're like the ghosts of Christmas past, present, future. You've reintroduced me to a sale, to these proper mince pies. What would you bring back from Christmases past?

[Dan Snow]

Food wise? I would bring back 12th cake instead of Christmas cake. Because Christmas cake isn't something that a lot of people know when to eat. They like it when, but they're not sure what to do with it. Whereas if you have it on Twelfth Night is a clearly defined moment to eat it, you can look forward to it. And it brings Christmas to a really lovely close. So Christmas doesn't peter out with a whimper, but goes out with a proper bang.

[Annie Gray]

So you would have the 12 days of Christmas reinstated?

[Dan Snow]

I would have the 12 days of Christmas reinstated and I'd bam. Going into their shops before about the 20th. All this Christmas tree is going up on December 1st malarkey. What is this? The needles drop by about 30. I'd also bring back a range of flavours and stop us being so obsessed with one set of dishes on Christmas day. Eat mince pies throughout the whole season and have 15 different types of mincemeat and drink was ale and, you know, have loads of different types of food on the table. And I think Christmas should be what we want it to be and not what we're told it should be. Get rid of the shoulds. Have only what we want.

[Annie Gray]

Thank you for coming on the show. What is your book called? So everyone can live this out in their own kitchen.

[Dan Snow]

It's called At Christmas We Feast.

[Annie Gray]

Anyway, at Christmas we feast. And we will. Thanks to you. Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's history. Hit. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure if you want to keep it going, that is to hit follow in your podcast player right now. You'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically. By the power of tech, you can listen anywhere you get your pods, Apple, Spotify, even BBC sounds. Imagine a world. Just imagine, you never miss an episode of this podcast. I mean, it's there. The technology makes that possible. That could be your reality right now if you hit follow. See you next time.

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[American Red Cross Announcer]

This holiday season, millions of families will pack their bags, load up the car, and head off for a family vacation. But not every trip is going to be somewhere fun. The American Red Cross responds to about 7,000 emergencies during the holiday season alone, from home fires to natural disasters, providing families a safe place to go when the unthinkable happens. But they can't do it without your support. Please [e-mail].