Michel Roux
Chef-owner at Chez Roux and former chef-patron at Le Gavroche restaurant
Quite a few years ago, we were about to have a Christmas lunch with Dad, Mum and family. The turkey – a real beauty – had been taken out of the oven and was resting on the kitchen table, so it was time to enjoy a glass or two of bub, as the old man used to say. We all gathered in the living room around the fire as he popped the champagne. But then, out of the corner of my eye, what did I see? Our dear labrador running down the lawn with the turkey in its mouth.
We all gasped in horror at first. But then we had to laugh. The dog had already consumed half the bloody turkey and was not going to give up the rest. We ended up having the trimmings. To be fair, the old man had overprepared, as he usually did. It was a wonderful occasion, and in some respects the dog’s intervention made it even more memorable.
Sally Abé
Executive chef at The Pem, London, and author of A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen
When I was at uni in Sheffield, I worked in a cocktail bar. The week before Christmas, I invited most of the team over for a Christmas roast. My place was really tiny and there were 10 of us squeezed in with not enough chairs. I decided to make loads of food but hadn’t considered that the more you put in the oven, the longer everything takes to cook.
So I had two chickens roasting along with potatoes and Yorkshire puddings, and it was just taking forever. I was hiding in the kitchen with a gin and tonic. After about three hours, I saw a couple of my guests nip out and come back with bags of KFC.
We did get there eventually, but a lunch that was supposed to happen at 3pm was more like 8pm, and the Yorkshire puddings went out the window. That was a bit of a dent to the ego.
Frances Atkins
Chef and co-owner of Paradise Cafe at Daleside Nurseries, Yorkshire
Five or six years ago, when we had the Yorke Arms [in Ramsgill, Yorkshire], we’d just finished a very busy Christmas Day lunch at the restaurant and I had to deliver another lunch to one of the cottages up the hill.
The hill was virtually opposite the dining room where our guests were having coffee. We loaded up my 4x4 with the stuffed turkey, bread sauce, devils on horseback, lobster cocktails, Christmas pudding – the works.
I jumped in the car and started up the hill. Halfway up I realised something was wrong. The tailgate had been left open and the food had slipped out, turkey and all. There was a trail of it all the way down. The guests in the dining room were shouting and screaming. Everybody came to help pick it up, but obviously you can’t serve food that’s been all over the messy road with sheep poo and goodness knows what else.
Fortunately, we were able to serve the next day’s menu so the people in the cottage were none the wiser, but for the rest of Christmas we were playing catch-up. It caused lots of merriment. It was the free entertainment, if you like – very Fawlty Towers.
Matt Christmas
Head chef at Chez Bruce, London
My wife used to run a pub in Dulwich, south London, and we lived in the flat upstairs. Chez Bruce was always closed at Christmas and the pub was open for lunch, so for many years I’d cook dinner for my wife and her staff and we’d all sit down to eat together after service.
One year I was upstairs cooking on the little stove in our flat. I had one of those heavy Le Creuset roasting dishes to cook the root veg in. It was taking ages to come up to temperature, so instead of standing there watching it, I went and had a beer in the living room with the dog.
Time went on and suddenly all hell broke loose. The fire alarms went off and all these people enjoying their lovely, celebratory Christmas lunch had to file outside in the cold. The root veg was what chefs would call “generously caramelised”. My wife wasn’t best pleased either.
Stosie Madi
Chef and co-owner at the Parkers Arms, Lancashire
One year we went out for drinks on Christmas Eve. I’d bought a lovely turkey and left it on the kitchen table thinking that when we got back I’d get it all sorted for the next day – we were having 23 people over for lunch. So we went to the pub and had a few drinks. When we got home – a little bit socially relaxed, shall we say – I went into the kitchen and there was no turkey.
I was confused; I couldn’t see it anywhere. Eventually I turned around and there it was, legs akimbo, wedged through the cat flap in the back door. It was quite a surprise because we didn’t have a cat – the people who lived there before us had installed the flap.
I managed to pull it out. It was damaged a bit at the front, so I trimmed it, slathered it in butter and wrapped it in a massive amount of streaky bacon. The next day I cooked it and no one was any the wiser. I did have a good giggle while everybody was tucking in.
Big Zuu
TV chef, musician and founder of water brand Drip
When I was 15 or 16, my mum let me cook Christmas dinner at home. Normally, in an African household, kids are seen and not heard and your mum cooks the food, but because I was so interested in cooking she let me give it a go.
I cooked the whole dinner by myself, to show that I could do it. My gauge at the time was the more deliciously brown it looked, the better. But I ended up drying out the bird completely, until it was basically inedible. Mum was super upset, because turkeys are not cheap. We ended up having a Christmas dinner of sides, but luckily I made a good mac and cheese so that saved it. And my mum turned the dry turkey meat into a soup the next day. From that year on she always made two meats just in case.
We’re Muslim, but we respect the Christmas tradition here in England. I feel like coming from a multicultural, diverse society, you have to be willing and open to celebrate these things, and Christmas is one of the biggest celebrations of all.
Fin and Lorcan Spiteri
Co-owners of Caravel, London
Lorcan: Last Christmas we decided to get creative and make Momofuku’s bao with braised pork.
Fin: We were at our mum’s cottage in Warwickshire. The kitchen is of an era, let’s say, and the bao recipe is quite specific and very technical.
L: It’s about three pages long and uses all sorts of different flours, which we didn’t have. Fin was on drinks duty and batch-made negronis. I think we probably had something silly like four litres in the fridge, and that was getting sloshed around while this bao disaster was unfolding.
F: We didn’t have the right steamers, so we had 14 different colanders on the hobs trying to steam these buns, and they were just not happening. Clearly, we’d gone wrong somewhere.
L: I don’t even remember if we ate anything. The buns were flat as pancakes. The whole house was filling up with steam. We were getting steamed. I woke up the next day and there was unidentified vomit in the sink upstairs and steam stains everywhere.
F: And lots of clumps of flour.
L: And a pile of bad looking buns. We did have the braised pork the next day for breakfast though, which was good.
F: We’ve since done bao again, but we bought frozen ones.
L: And stopped drinking.
F: Yeah we haven’t drunk since then. Never again.
Lisa Goodwin-Allen
Executive chef at Northcote, Lancashire
When I was younger, my extended family would get together at our house at Christmas. We had two dogs at the time, a collie and a golden retriever, both quite active characters. In the morning we’d decorate trestle tables in the conservatory and put out the starters, buffet-style. It was all the retro stuff: prawns, smoked salmon, sausages, melon, forest fruits.
Everyone was in the kitchen enjoying drinks when we heard a crash. We rushed into the conservatory: one of the dogs had jumped up, causing a table leg to give way and the food to slide down. They were finishing off the prawns, smoked salmon and sausages. We still had plenty of food, so nobody went hungry – but the dogs had a great Christmas, a really fantastic day.
Olia Hercules
Chef and author of Home Food
In 2021, the last time my parents came over for Christmas before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, my mum decided she’d bring two home-reared ducks with her to London. She slaughtered them at the end of autumn and froze them. Flying over, she put one into her own suitcase and one into my dad’s. They arrived white-faced because my dad’s suitcase had gone missing.
We still had one duck but it wasn’t enough: we had 16 people coming for pre-Christmas celebrations and it was too late to order anything from the butcher. For the next day and a half we waited anxiously for the suitcase, worrying that the duck would spoil.
It turned up just before Christmas. I remember us running out to the taxi, grabbing the suitcase from the driver and discreetly sniffing it. We whipped it inside and opened it, and thankfully the duck was still rock hard – it must have been sitting somewhere very cold.
That was a happy, happy time. My mum cooked the meal perfectly – it was a delicious celebration of one of her last ducks.
Lee Tiernan
Chef owner at FKABAM, London
I was cooking for the whole family at our place in London, around 28 people. We bought a new fridge to accommodate all the food and I put the meat in there overnight. I decided to use my wood-fired oven in the garden to cook the veg.
I had undergone arm surgery a few days earlier and was on some very strong painkillers. The wood-fired oven had been dormant for a year so it wouldn’t heat up no matter how much wood I put in. I thought the turkey and the beef rib would save the day, but it turned out the new fridge had frozen the meat. When I probed the beef to see if it was done, it had an internal reading of 3C.
There was lots of friendly but not very helpful interventions from the family. We were cleared out of Kettle Chips and olives. I ended up whipping the legs off the turkey, much to everyone’s dismay because people like it to be carved at the table. It wasn’t my best Christmas dinner. I wanted Santa to come down the chimney and drag me off for a pint.
Karla Zazueta
Cookery teacher and author of Norteña
My family’s Christmas tradition in the north of Mexico is to have tamales – little parcels of dough filled with shredded pork and beef – but about 12 years ago we decided to roast a turkey. It was my sister’s idea. We’d never cooked turkey before so we had no idea how to do it. The turkey was massive. On the day, my sister took it out of the freezer with not enough time to defrost and bunged it in the oven.
Everybody was like, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” She insisted she did, but when dinnertime came, the turkey was raw. The only bit that was kind of cooked was the leg. My sister said it was fine, but nobody apart from her and one other guest tried it. Luckily for us, my mum had prepared a pozole stew in case something went wrong. Since then we’ve stuck to what we know best: tamales.
Jane Baxter
Chef and co-owner at Wild Artichokes, Devon
Going home to Sunderland about 10 years ago, I took some duck fat up with me for the roast potatoes. My mum wouldn’t let me do anything in the kitchen; she was a good cook but had her own way of doing things. She was getting the potatoes ready and I noticed a horrible smell. She was melting what she thought was the duck fat on a tray on the stovetop. It turned out she’d taken a tub of hummus out of the fridge and was melting that instead. Luckily I caught it before it went over the potatoes.
Si King
Hairy Biker and co-author of Our Family Favourites
Four years ago, Dylan, my youngest son, and I decided to brine a turkey for Christmas. It was a really good turkey, a Kelly Bronze, and they come with fantastic instructions. We’re one of those families who, when we get an Ikea bed, just throw the instructions away and hope for the best, because we are overconfident in our own abilities.
Dylan goes, “Dad, are we going to follow these instructions?” I went, “No, I know how to brine a turkey.” I put it in for 30 minutes. Then we had a drink and completely forgot about it. Half a bottle of Bushmills later I said, “Did you take the turkey out of the brine?” And he was like, “No, you did, didn’t you?” It was in there for a good 10 hours.
Honest to god, it was as dry as a hound’s tooth. I said, “Dylan, do the trick with the gravy, paint it on, it’ll be fine.” It absolutely wasn’t. The moral of the story is: remove whiskey from said scenario and all will be well. But the boys and I don’t get together very often, and when we do, there’s always a night of overexcitement, which ultimately means jigging about in the front room. And in this case, a very dry turkey.
