Greetings to All and to All a great Holiday memory.
We all look forward to the Holiday season, but most of us flavor our expectations with remembrances of an earlier day. Children, like puppies and kittens, think with their tastebuds and noses. Such memories become indelible.
I suppose that's why there's such emotional turmoil in some hearts at the closing of the year.
As for me, I remember my earliest childhood (I had one, really) when each of my neighbors had different reasons for their holiday lights. We were a Norman Rockwell sort of suburbia. We not only tolerated, we loved each other's festivals.
My best friends, Jimmy and Anne, celebrated different reasons for joy at the dark of the season. And as for me? Well, my family celebrated every holiday that came along.
I'd go next door to Jimmy's house to watch him play with the newest trains in his ever-growing train set. The living room was vast and dim. At Christmas he had a Christmas tree that went straight up to the ceiling. His train set was nestled in cotton stretched to look like snow at the base of the tree. Ornaments covered the pine needles, and were themselves coated over with tinsel, and I had never seen anything more dazzling in all my life, not even the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. The house smelled of pine and cedar, wood crackling in the fireplace, all overlaid with the scent of dinner in the oven.
Anne's grandmother did the cooking in their family. Alas, she was a dreadful cook. And so her Chanukah lotkes were almost inedible, her beef needed a hacksaw, and her cookies were dry as the Negev. As were her other Holiday treats. We ate them out of respect. But Anne got gifts too. And she had a menorah lit with candles against the dark of the year, and so even her granny's ghastly food tasted better by the steady glow of their small clean clear lights. We sang songs, and laughed, and made the house safe and cozy against the night.
My mother hated to cook. How can you celebrate everything if you can't cook? She did it very nicely, thank you. She was the manager of an exclusive chocolate shop where they made all their own chocolate. So Christmas for me was Santas filled with rich, cremes flavored with maple, rum and berries. We had trees of solid milk or dark. Chocolate Dreidels. Brittle and fudge and truffles. Fat chocolate covered prunes that had been soaked in rum. Peppermint this and jellies of that. Chocolate covered everything! Ah me. I don't remember what was for dinner. For me, the holidays were a constant desert.
When I grew up and had my own family, I had to invent my own Holiday Feast.
I made it as ecumenical as my upbringing. And so I share with you my recipe for the best ever Winter Solstice meal. I once studied cooking at the China Institute in Manhattan, and I loved French food. Thus - my Boeuf du Chine.
All ingredient sizes are up to the chef.
Take a really good tender beef roast.
Cut into tidy squares. Dredge in flour, and saute on all sides.
Have a huge pot ready to put them in.
In that pot: at least four cans of pure beef broth, a bunch or two of chopped scallions, as much crushed garlic as you like.
At least two handfuls of peeled tiny pearl onions.
6 to 8 carrots, chopped into segments
2 big crispy green peppers, likewise sliced.
And - a few handfuls of dried Chinese Mushrooms, soaked in water until they expand.
Slice them and into the pot they go.
1 cup of good dark soy sauce (Kikkoman is good)
Ditto Beaujolais.
As it cooks, add as much soy sauce and Beaujolais as you like.
Cook and cook and taste, and add. Cook some more until everything is soft and rich, tasting of earth and field, soy sauce and wine.
Serve with a crunchy French bread, potatoes if you want them, a green salad on the side. And more wine of your choice.
(Note to those who abhor alcohol. There is no alcohol content in the stew itself now. It's all been cooked out.)
The thing is to make a memory to lighten the darkness of the year, and our lives.
I have so many glorious holiday memories. I know you do too.
Do share your favorite with us, please.
I'll pick a name (blindfolded) and send an autographed copy of one of my Regency Christmas Anthologies to some merry person who posts a memory here.