Coffee Table Book of: Christmas Dinner (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Christmas Dinner is a large-format coffee table book about Christmas dinner around the world, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. It sets the meal on the table country by country, from the goose and pudding of Britain to a Christmas lunch on a summer lawn.

It opens with the table laid by candlelight.

Then Germany, Austria and the Czech lands: goose with red cabbage and dumplings, a carp cooked blue, fried carp with potato salad, sausages and stollen. Then the meatless Christmas Eve suppers of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine: wafers, beetroot borscht, pierogi, kutia, herring and small biscuits in poppy seed milk.

Then Scandinavia, Finland and Iceland: a Swedish ham under a crust of crumbs, Jansson’s temptation, lutefisk, rice porridge, risalamande with cherry sauce, lamb ribs on birch sticks, pork belly with crackling, a beetroot salad, leaf bread, and smoked lamb with peas.

Then France and Quebec: oysters, tablecloths laid one over another, a gratin of cardoons, the desserts of Provence, a buche de Noel and a tourtiere. Then Italy: fried salt cod beside a bowl of clams, eel, tortellini in broth, a roast capon, pandoro and struffoli.

Then Latin America and the Caribbean: tamales steaming in a clay pot, a tamal opened on its husk to show its filling, romeritos in mole, salt cod with olives, hot fruit punch with small clay mugs, hallacas, pan de jamon, pernil with rice and pigeon peas, pasteles, coquito, and panettone with hot chocolate.

Then the Noche Buena of the Philippines: a small roast suckling pig on banana leaves, a ham with a ball of Edam, bibingka and purple puto bumbong. Toward the end, eggnog, a country ham with biscuits, pork vindaloo, sugared almonds, and a table laid with prawns and oysters on a summer lawn.

Short notes run through the book. They are about the food and the customs of the table, rather than about the pictures: why a plum pudding has no plums, how the Swedish Christmas ham gets its crust, how hallacas are wrapped and cooked, and what is served with the ham at Noche Buena.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.