Last Saturday we had a Christmas party for our Anthropology of Food course. One of my classmates, Maria, kindly hosted the event and the idea was that everyone bring something that is eaten in their home country at Christmas.
Well, rules are made to broken and I was the first one to do so. I was planning to make this:
... a canape my family almost always have either on Christmas Eve or Day in Australia, though I can't speak for other families.
Instead I made this:
... which we have never had on Christmas, but I couldn't find the pork mince I needed in Sainsbury's and I felt like making the tart.
Juliana also broke the rules with a palm heart pie, which like her was Brasilian, though not Christmassy:
Mukta and Ezgi broke the rules in different ways, bringing shop bought goodies. I wasn't complaining though, the baklava Ezgi bought was the best I've had in a very long time. Light, crisp pastry, not too sweet and sickly and not too soggy, with the perfect ratio of pastry to pistachio:
Where did she get it? Turkey, of course. I really wish she had said Green Lanes, but it is not through a lack of trying that I have been missing the good stuff.
She also bought some lovely spinach borek which her Mum made back from Turkey:
Mukta's vege samosas from Ambala Foods were great too, much less greasy than usual and with a bit of a kick:
Marcello, who is from Italy, brought a range of cheeses from Switzerland, not because his family eat lots of cheese on Christmas day or because he has a particular pechant for Swiss cheeses, but because he works for a Swiss cheese company at Borough market, so why not?
And Sophia made this lovely fruit loaf to accompany it:
So did anyone stick to the rules? Yes, a few. Tessa made mince pies for England; Sophia, Christmas candies for Sweden; and Mira, roast pork and French salad for Croatia.
Now French salad may not sound especially Croatian, but I learnt something interesting from Mira. What the Spanish call ensalada rusa, i.e. Russian salad, is a variation of what the Croatians (and presumably other Eastern European countries) call French salad. The defining feature is a lot of mayonnaise, which each nation presumably thinks the other is in the habit of consuming vast quantities of, much more than themselves.
On a similar thread, Mira told me that the Danish call Danishes Viennese pastries. Ha! The things one learns at a party full of aspiring food anthropologists.
As you can see my photography is getting ropey at this point. I had consumed vast quantities of wine. I'm afraid this meant that I did not capture the fabulous latkes (potato pancakes) which Jonathan made in the Hannukah tradition. Or the jam donuts he was still churning out when most of the guests had left.
I also failed to photograph the delicacy from Acca's hometown in China, where they do not celebrate Christmas, but where they do eat plenty of fishballs in a steaming, peppery broth.
And I was sad that I not only missed photographing, but also missed eating Maria's Italian chickpea soup because I was too heavily engaged in a very civilised and intellectually stimulating conversation about the 'good old days' at SOAS when no one could study for all the shagging, the library as a potential pick up point on campus, young shagging, mature shagging and parents shagging. God help us.
Suffice it to say, it was a fun night all round. When it comes to writing our essays, we may all need to work on our ability to stick to the task at hand. But when it comes to throwing a good party, we've already found a recipe that works.