As one of five children from an Italian-Irish family living in Glasgow, I never found Christmas dull. It was a number of things: unpredictable, riotous, painful (especially the year my mother left the turkey out all night and the leftovers nearly killed the lot of us). But it was never, ever boring. And, thanks to my Italian mother’s kitchen skills, it was delicious — an exhilarating mishmash of three very different culinary cultures.
Locally, Mum was famous for her cooking, especially at Christmas.
Not only would she distribute her legendary meringues and shortbread, aka The Best Shortbread in the World, to everyone from the hairdresser’s down the road to the neighbouring nuns, she would also invite any number of curious characters to join us round our vast, expandable table: every eccentric spinster without her own family; odd, whiskery men from my father’s Irish music collective; wannabe-playboy antiques dealers.
We teenage kids would regard these guests with ill-disguised suspicion, especially when their eyes stretched greedily at the typically outrageous amount of food. Who knew thin, often elderly people could eat so much?
Lunch, a flexible description for something that usually started at about four and lasted until people conked out, would kick off with Italian brodo, a clear chicken consommé, testament to Mum’s innate frugality and the distillation of cheap boiling fowls. The innocent, sparkling clarity of this broth belied its depth of flavour. At other times it would be served to us with pastina — tiny pasta shapes for soup — but the Christmas touch was labour-intensive, fried eggy croutons: “Cretins”, we called them — my beloved Glasgow, as ever, a stranger to political correctness.
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Of course, we had to have the traditional turkey and trimmings. There’s nothing more conservative, more keen to assimilate, than the children of immigrants. On the one hand, I thrilled to my (comparatively) exotic background, to my full, both-grandmothers-inspired name: Marina Genevieve Pia. On the other,
I wanted what my pals were having for Christmas. Mum dutifully obliged. Besides, she knew back then how well experimentation went down with her stick-in-the-mud kids. I have one brother who went to live in Japan for six months and survived basically on KFC. But her stealth touches raised the pedestrian fowl to another level: the sage-and-onion stuffing hummed with vast quantities of garlic and parmesan, sharing a touch of its DNA with the mixture my mother put into her homemade ravioli.
We were all allocated our own jobs — mine was to make both bread and cranberry sauces, which nobody else was much fussed about but I loved. Christmas cakes and puddings were augmented by her praline ice cream, or a fiendishly complicated Italian sponge cake layered with crema pasticcera and laced with enough booze to make the younger children cross-eyed (see Giorgio Locatelli’s version, in this section).
Scotland didn’t get much of a spotlight at the Christmas table other than at breakfast time, when smoked salmon came with potato scones fried in butter. Tattie scones still to this day taste like comfort and home to me.
But Ireland played a starring role, with my father’s insistence on spiced beef. It’s said that this is the dish that crossed the Atlantic with the fleeing Irish to transform en route into US deli-style corned beef. A dramatic-looking brisket joint, the meat’s surface was crusted jet black from its ferocious spicing: clove, nutmeg, mace, black pepper. The inside was a hectic scarlet thanks to saltpetre — a preservative and potentially poisonous ingredient used in the making of gunpowder. My brothers christened this challenging number “Ralgex beef” after the equally potent muscle-relief spray. We all hated the stuff, nearly as much as we hated the wretched, inevitable sprouts, but every year, like clockwork, here it was again. This is where the peculiar guests came in handy: they would eat anything.
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Glasgow was always the setting for our Christmases. Only once did we leave the city, heading for the hills above Florence, where the family of my sister’s partner had sprawling farmland and a handful of buildings.
It was pretty basic. No kitchen as such, just an open fire in the middle of the room. (No, this wasn’t centuries ago, but relatively recently.) I had no idea that Italy could get as cold as it was over that December. It all engendered a kind of Blitz spirit: lots of red wine, lots of grappa, lots of fat, fennelly Italian sausages spitting like, well, bangers over the flames.
My mother died earlier this year, leaving a gaping absence in our lives: tiny person, huge loss. Christmas has imploded; none of the five of us is really sure what to do with ourselves now. We’re scattered, too, which doesn’t help: my sister in Florence, one brother in Scotland’s Highlands and Islands, me in deepest seaside Kent. I’m hoping that once the sense of dislocation and disarray recedes even a tiny bit, we’ll be able to craft our own traditions for our extended families and our own children. But one thing I know: nobody is going to be making that bloody Ralgex beef.
This piece first appeared in the December edition of Waitrose Food Magazine
