Why is it that I love, or used to love, trains so much? I thought about this often when I was effectively banned, by the virus, from my normal daily journey between Oxford and London, 63 miles each way. Even now, in bare modern trains systematically stripped of character and romance, there can be a glorious seclusion in a long-distance train that does not stop too much. The soft and distant landscape rolls by, and at any time I can look up and see a familiar hill, church, or stretch of woodland. I can name much of what I see, and have walked over a great deal of it, purposely seeking to know the land better. If I am traveling from the North of England to London, I always try to change at York, to the hourly nonstop train to the capital. The feeling of peace and irresponsibility that spreads through me as the train heaves itself out of the station is a special joy. For two hours nobody can bother me. For two hours I will not be disturbed. For two hours I will be enclosed in a warm and comfortable space, again passing through familiar towns and fields along the route so wonderfully described by Philip Larkin in “The Whitsun Weddings“, until the brakes tighten and I am in prosaic London. And it seems to me that everyone else on that train will be similarly calmed and soothed.
Of course, the accursed cell phone and the even more accursed smartphone have penetrated the seclusion. And alas, there are no more dining cars, a delight now almost completely abolished by spiteful managements, and available mainly on ridiculous super-luxury trains such as the pastiche Orient Express. Yet no restaurant meal I have ever had, including the pressed duck at the old Tour D’Argent in Paris (before it became a museum where you could eat the exhibits), has surpassed the breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners I have eaten in trains.
I think of the wonderful bacon and eggs, accompanied by soda bread, on the cross-border Belfast-to-Dublin flyer in Ireland; the vast plates of pork and dumplings accompanied by Pilsener beer on the somnolent Zapadny Express from Nuremberg to Prague; the fresh pancakes and maple syrup at breakfast on the California Limited, with antelopes fleeing from the train somewhere between Dodge City and Albuquerque; the first sip of tea from the samovar, served in a glass in an ornate silver holder, on the Red Star night sleeper from Moscow to Leningrad; the first glass of wine on a sunny September evening as the Rome Express, an hour out of Paris, clattered southward past the faintly minatory cathedral tower at Sens. Then there were the toasted teacakes near Grantham on the southbound Flying Scotsman, and the superb galley-cooked steak on the upper deck of the Chicago-bound Capitol Limited, as it climbed westward through the evening into the forests beyond Harper’s Ferry and up the Potomac valley.
Peter Hitchens, “Why I Love Trains”, First Things, 2020-07-16.
February 15, 2026
QotD: The love of long-distance train travel
February 11, 2026
The “True” History of Key Lime Pie: Florida or New York?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 12 Aug 2025Key lime pie in a graham cracker crust with meringue, garnished with lime zest and lime peel
City/Region: Key West, Florida
Time Period: April 14, 1933Yet another example of a dish with multiple origin stories, the key lime pie was perhaps invented in Key West in 1875 by Aunt Sally, the possible cook or family member of William Joseph Curry, Florida’s first millionaire, when she observed Cuban sponge collectors making a cream of lime juice, condensed milk, and egg yolk. Or maybe it was a spin on Borden’s (the makers of Eagle brand condensed milk) Magic Lemon Pie, created in New York City in 1931.
Either way, this recipe from 1933, one of the first using a graham cracker crust, is delicious. The filling is smooth, but firms up well, and the lime flavor really stands out without being too tart.
Tropical Lime Pie
Mix thoroughly:
1 can condensed milk,
1/4 cup evaporated milk,
3 egg yellows,
1-3 lime juice, strained.
Butter 9-inch pie tin heavily. Sprinkle graham cracker crumbs about one-fourth inch thick for crust, pressing crumbs well up on sides of pan. Pour in uncooked custard and cover with meringue, using three egg whites and three scant tablespoons of sugar. Brown in moderate oven and allow to set for one hour before serving. Serves six.— Mrs. Mabel McClanahan, Key West Florida, in The Miami Herald, April 14, 1933
February 7, 2026
Food hang-ups by generation
Around the early to mid-80s, I started to notice trends in the kind of health information being pushed by the mainstream media. One of the big topics of the day was the dangers of … eggs. Eggs were so dangerous that “experts” were warning adults to avoid eating more than one or two per week. Three was the absolute limit and you were dicing with death if you went over that “healthy” limit. Then, a few years later, eggs were “the perfect food” and we weren’t eating enough of these formerly abominated death pills. A few years after that, OMG! Apples, people, apples! Danger, danger, danger! That was around the time I stopped putting any credence into health reporting in the media. However, as Lisa De Pasquale points out, food issues have been an ongoing struggle for each succeeding generation:
In the ’80s, the ultimate healthy Boomer breakfast was a bran muffin. There were also various cereals like Grape-Nuts and Raisin Bran. There definitely wasn’t room for their parents’ bacon and eggs unless you had a death wish. Boomers settled on eggs as the devil’s snack when the American Heart Association warned in the 1960s that people shouldn’t consume more than three eggs per week. Like social distancing six feet from others during COVID and eight 8oz glasses of water per day, the recommendation wasn’t based on science, but on being a simple number Americans could remember.
Thanks, but this Gen Xer will stick to getting my 8,675,309 steps per year as my guiding fitness principle.
[…]
The Millennial Food Pyramid
Level One: Genetically Modified Organism and Nonorganic Foods — Use Sparingly
While Gen X was at ground zero in doubting Big Food’s pyramid, our Millennial colleagues and kids really continued the battle. Like luxury logos, they seek out the organic and non-GMO labels. It’s a virtue signal of both their values and what they can afford. Erewhon smoothies, anyone?
Level Two: Various Overpriced Coffee Drinks — Two to Three Servings
Gen Xers link coffee to work and responsibility; caffeine is a tool to get through the morning. Millennials view coffee drinks as self-care. It’s about treating themselves to dessert any time of day — a major win for marketing executives.
Level Three: Charcuterie Boards, Wine, Hard Seltzers, Craft Beers — Three to Five Servings
Millennials love to entertain. Nothing shows sophistication and “adulting” in your 30s and early 40s like a charcuterie board. Lunchables upgraded! They came of drinking age at the same time as small-batch beers, American boutique wineries, and hard seltzers.
Level Four: Instagram-Worthy Food — Six to Eleven Servings
Camera phones leveled up the entertainment value of food consumption. Like organic labels, what Millennials eat signals their open-mindedness. As they get older, they straddle the line of wanting to be in on the trends (avocado toast and açai bowls) and the dive you haven’t heard of with authentic phở.
The Generation Z and Generation Alpha Food Pyramid
Level One: Real Meat, Dairy, and Peanuts — Use Sparingly
The Gen X and Millennial generations dabbled in veggie burgers, but Gen Z and Gen Alpha went whole lab-created hog into plant-based meats and milks, to the point that meat and milk no longer have a meaning until a company gets sued for using the words. To be fair, they are also embracing biohacking trends and ditching seed oils. Due to the growing prevalence of allergies, peanuts are a universal no-no food in public spaces.
Level Two: TikTok Recipes — Two to Three Servings
The term “recipe” is used loosely. I’ve come across a TikTok video for making a cream sauce from a block of cream cheese, water, and dried pasta. There is a positive aspect of trying these TikTok recipes, though: it prepares them for trying new things and for failure when a recipe doesn’t come out right.
Level Three: Food Delivery Service Meals — Three to Five Servings
Postmates, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash are staples at mealtime. Following their surge during the COVID era as restaurants struggled to stay in business, accounts linked to their parents’ bank accounts became as common as sharing a cell phone plan.
Level Four: Gamer Food and Drinks — Six to Eleven Servings
Living next to a park has taught me one thing about Gen Z and Gen Alpha — they’re all inside. I mostly see neighborhood kids on Halloween, and every year, I recognize fewer and fewer costumes because they’re dressed as video game characters. Their snacks are manufactured for their attention span: quick hits of spicy, sour, or sweet while on pause. The gamer culture and H Mart remove barriers as Japanese snacks dominate.
So, where does this leave Gen X? We’re not immune to the powers of Big Food. In fact, recent research shows that ultra-processed food addiction began with us thanks to the explosion and availability of ultra palatable foods with added refined carbs and fats. StudyFinds reported researchers from the University of Michigan said, “Individuals who are now older adults were in developmentally sensitive stages during the 1970s and 1980s, precisely when tobacco-owned food manufacturers were shaping the market with addictive ultra-processed foods”.
February 3, 2026
The Killer Pigs of the Middle Ages
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Aug 2025Sliced roasted pork loin with jus
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1390Pigs were an important source of food in the Middle Ages. They didn’t take up a lot of space, had lots of babies, and ate pretty much anything, so despite their smell and bouts of violence (sometimes ending in murder), they were commonly found throughout Europe.
This English recipe, which uses black pepper, coriander seed, caraway seed, and wine, all expensive ingredients that had to come from far away, wouldn’t have been for the common folk. Today, these ingredients are readily found at the grocery store, and this is a delicious roast that is perfect for those just getting into medieval cooking. As with a lot of historical recipes, there are no quantities given, so feel free to adjust the amounts of any of the spices to suit your taste.
Cormarye.
Take Coriander, Caraway small ground, Powder of Pepper and garlic ground in red wine, muddle all this together and salt it, take loins of Pork raw and flay off the skin, and prick it well with a knife and lay it in the sauce, roast thereof what thou wilt, & keep that that falleth therefrom in the roasting and seeth it in a little pot with fair broth, & serve it forth with the roast anon.
— The Forme of Cury, 1390
January 27, 2026
Did People in the Middle Ages Drink Water?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 1 Aug 2025A brew of barley, licorice, figs, and sugar
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1393The myth persists that everyone was drunk in the Middle Ages because no one drank water, only alcohol. While many people preferred to drink ale, wine, or mead, people drank water all the time. Having a source of fresh, clean water was the basis of the location of many cities and towns.
Clean water isn’t just an issue of the past, either. Today, 1 in 10 people don’t have access to clean water. For the month of August, I’m joining thousands of creators across the internet to form Team Water with the goal of raising $40 million to supply 2 million people with clean water which will flow for decades. You can support Team Water by donating at teamwater.org, or by watching and sharing the episode for this recipe. I’ll be donating all of the ad revenue from this video to Team Water!
This sweet tisane is an herbal tea made with barley, licorice root, figs, and sugar. I really enjoyed it, even though the flavor of the licorice and figs didn’t come through. It kind of reminds me of the milk after you’ve eaten a bowl of Raisin Bran, which I like.
Sweet tisane.
Take some water and boil it, then for each septier of water add one generous bowl of barley — it does not matter if it is all hulled — and two parisis’ worth of licorice; item, also figs. Boil until the barley bursts, then strain through two or three pieces of linen, and put plenty of rock sugar in each goblet. The barley that remains can be fed to poultry to fatten them.
— Le Ménagier de Paris, 1393
January 20, 2026
Feeding the Great Mongol Khan
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Jul 2025Mastic stew with black rice, spices, and lamb, garnished with cilantro
City/Region: Mongol Empire | China
Time Period: 1330The grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan doubled the size of the largest land empire the world had ever known by conquering China. We actually know quite a bit about the foods that fueled his empire-expanding efforts. Shortly after his death, Yinshàn zhèngyào, or The Proper and Necessary Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink, was written, and its recipes include ingredients from across Kublai Khan’s vast empire.
The mastic in this stew is a resin from the mastic tree in the Mediterranean, and it has a bitterness along with cedar or pine notes. I really like it in sweet things, but there is no sugar in this dish. The stew is aromatic and smells of cardamom and cinnamon, but they don’t come through in the flavor. The bitterness of the mastic and the lamb dominate the dish, but Kublai Khan was eating this dish to invigorate his chi, so maybe the flavor didn’t matter as much.
I used black rice, or forbidden rice, so named because supposedly it was only eaten by the emperor and his court for much of Chinese history, and it makes the stew a deep purple. You can use long grain white or brown rice, which will make for a lighter colored dish.
Nourishes, warms the middle and grants chi. Leg of mutton, five tsaoko cardamoms, 2 ch’ien cinnamon, one half sheng chickpeas, mash and remove the skins. Boil the ingredients together to make a soup, strain it. Cut up the meat and set aside. Add 2 ho of cooked chickpeas, 1 sheng of aromatic rice, 1 ch’ien of mastic. Mix well with a little salt. Add chopped meat and cilantro.
— Yinshàn zhèngyào by Hu Sihui, 1330
January 13, 2026
The History of SPAM
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Jul 2025Sliced SPAM layered with cream cheese filling, sliced and served with potato salad and tomatoes
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1951SPAM. The iconic canned meat product. Beloved by some, reviled by others, SPAM was buoyed by a very successful marketing blitz by the Hormel company starting in the 1930s. There were radio and magazine ads, The Hormel Girls (a singing group), and recipes.
I’m not the biggest fan of SPAM, and this recipe turned out way too salty for me. If you want to make the historical recipe, go ahead and follow it, but I would personally opt for the reduced sodium SPAM and cut out the salt in the cream cheese mixture. If you like SPAM, definitely try this out! It’s super flavorful, but it’s just not to my taste.
Tender, pure-pork SPAM joins with a zesty cream cheese mixture for memorable eating. Serve for supper or lunch — or as a noteworthy appetizer.
SPAM ‘n’ Cheese Ribbon Loaf
Cut in 8 slices……1 whole SPAM
Mix together……1 (3-oz.) package cream cheese (softened with a little milk)
1 tsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. grated onion
1 tbsp. minced parsley
1/4 tsp. salt
Spread between……slices of SPAM
Chill……4 hours (or longer; overnight if desired). Slice and serve. Good with deviled eggs or potato salad.Economical all-meat buy! No bone, no waste. SPAM is all meat … juicy pork shoulder and mild, tender ham, with Hormel’s unequalled seasonings.
— Hormel advertisement, 1951
January 8, 2026
QotD: Canned food and the early days of the Raj
You might even miss something culturally. For instance, there’s an entire sub-subdiscipline called “Food and Foodways”, and it’s not as silly as it sounds. Canned food was an important part of British cultural life in the Raj, for instance. File it under “Women Ruin Everything” — once it got safe enough for ladies to have a reasonable chance of surviving East of Suez, the awesome freewheeling decadence of the “White Mughals” period was replaced by dour, dowdy Victorian bullshit. Every summer the “fishing fleet” pulled into Calcutta harbor, disembarking scads of ugly British girls with a Bible in one hand and a can of spotted dick in the other, determined to snag the highest-ranking ICS man they could and, in the process, turn India into another boring suburb of Edinburgh. Anglo-Indian cookbooks are full of recipes for horrid British glop straight out of cans, and if you routinely got really, really sick from eating spoiled stuff, well, hard cheese, old chap! Heaven forbid you eat the delicious, nutritious, climate-optimized cuisine that was literally right there …
If you want to argue that the Indian Army fought so many border wars just to get away from sour, hectoring memsahibs and their godawful tinned slop, I’m not going to stop you.
Anyway, the point is, IF you are conversant enough with the relevant technical stuff, it occurs to me that you can get a snapshot of embedded cultural assumptions by looking at a period’s characteristic or representative technology.
Severian, “Assumption Artifacts”, Founding Questions, 2024-04-30.
January 6, 2026
Typhoid Mary’s Deadly Ice Cream
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 15 Jul 2025Fresh peach ice cream frozen in a mold garnished with sliced peaches and peach puree
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1877Mary Mallon, born in 1869, was a cook for wealthy families, but she’s better known for being the first person found to be an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. While most food was cooked to a temperature that kills the typhoid-causing bacteria, the families that employed Mary loved her peach ice cream.
While ice cream that has eggs in it is cooked, and there’s no way to know what kind Mary made, I opted for a recipe from the time for American style ice cream that has no eggs and isn’t cooked. Whichever ice cream base Mary used, she put cut up fresh peaches into it, which certainly could have carried the bacteria.
Gruesome inspiration for this recipe aside, the ice cream is really good. There’s a ton of fresh peach flavor, and you can make it as sweet or not as you like. The slices of peach inside the ice cream were very cold and kind of froze my mouth, so you could try cutting them up into smaller pieces to avoid the brain freeze I got.
Peach Ice-Cream
Mix a quart of cream with a cupful of sugar and four tablespoons of sherry. Add four cupfuls of peaches mashed fine and sweetened to taste, and freeze.
— Everyday Desserts by Olive Green (Myrtle Reed), 1911
January 4, 2026
“You will eat the bugs, peasant!”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR reacts to yet another “bugs are yummy, peons, you are going to eat them” post:
Contemplating this picture, I had a realization about the people who want you to eat bugs.
The fact that the bugs are disgusting to you is the whole point. Enlisting you as the principal enforcer of your oppression is the program. Fucking with your head is the actual goal, not just a tactic.
It doesn’t matter whether or not Western prejudice against eating insects is irrational. In an alternate world where we routinely eat insects, the people who want you to eat the bugs would find some other kind of disgusting garbage and play to make you eat it.
Because this isn’t sustainability or any of that bullshit. The degradation is the point.
However, even the powers-that-be can’t magically create economic conditions in which insect factories earn profits:
In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.
h/t Tom Nelson
How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
By Anna Heim, TechCrunchThe company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.
Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the food chain” with insect-based protein. But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many Westerners feel about bugs. Human food was never its core focus.
It’s only money …
And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).
The vainglorious heady days of climate communism meant some bureaucrats thought it made sense to spend $200 million dollars feeding bugs to cows to try to change rainfall in 2100 AD.
January 1, 2026
New Year’s Good Luck “Pasta Fazool” (Pasta e Fagioli) – Food Wishes
Food Wishes
Published 31 Dec 2019Scientists will tell you that there’s no way eating pork, beans, and/or greens at the beginning of a new year can bring you good luck and great fortune; but our lab-coated, left-brained friends are missing one very important fact: People who think they’re lucky, are lucky.
For a fully formatted, printable, written recipe, follow this link: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/277…
You can also find more of Chef John’s content on Allrecipes: http://allrecipes.com/recipes/16791/e…
December 29, 2025
Will 2026 finally be the year Canada abandons food cartels?
For reasons unknown, Canadian politicians both left and right have been willing to sacrifice almost anything in trade negotiations except the cosy protectionist scheme we call “supply management”, which enriches a tiny number of farmers in Ontario and Quebec by keeping grocery prices significantly higher than the free market price. On his Substack, The Food Professor predicts that Prime Minister Carney will be forced to give up this market-rigging, anti-consumer scheme in the coming year:
Image from Agri-Food Analytics Lab, Dalhousie University
As we enter 2026, several forces are converging to reshape Canada’s food economy. Consumer empowerment — amplified by social media — continues to accelerate, while geopolitics, particularly tensions with our southern neighbour, are becoming increasingly disruptive. Together, these dynamics will push food policy issues that once lived in technical silos into the public spotlight.
At the top of that list sits CUSMA and supply management. Prime Minister Carney has signaled firmness on market access, backed by legislation that shields supply management from parliamentary debate. That protection, however, is unlikely to endure. Even if the United States has little genuine interest in exporting more dairy to Canada — and even if Canadian consumers show limited appetite for it — President Trump now understands, far better than during his first term, that supply management is a potent political wedge. The system protects roughly 9,400 dairy farmers who exert disproportionate influence over agricultural policy, while compensation payments continue to flow without any meaningful reduction in production or market share. For a growing number of Canadians, this arrangement increasingly resembles a closed loop rather than a public good. The irony is that global demand for dairy is rising and Canadian milk should be part of that growth story. Instead, the system prioritizes insulation over ambition — a missed opportunity at a time when competitiveness should matter most.
January 1 also marks the formal implementation of new front-of-package nutrition labels. Although these symbols have been appearing on shelves for some time, many consumers either overlook them or misunderstand their purpose. Their real impact has been largely invisible to the public: they have already reshaped how food companies formulate products, invest in research, and redesign portfolios. Whether the labels meaningfully change consumer behaviour remains debatable, but their influence on product development is no longer.
[…]
Finally, 2026 coincides with the United Nations’ International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists — a timely moment to reset the debate around meat consumption and livestock production. Rangelands underpin global meat systems by converting grasslands — often unsuitable for crops — into high-quality protein. In a world where demand for animal protein continues to grow, portraying livestock as inherently incompatible with sustainability ignores nutritional, economic, and ecological realities. Well-managed grazing supports rural livelihoods, strengthens export economies, and can enhance biodiversity and soil health rather than undermine them. If policymakers are serious about food security, climate resilience, and affordability, 2026 should mark a shift away from apologizing for meat production and toward recognizing livestock as a strategic pillar of resilient food systems — not a sector to be regulated out of existence
What Are Sugar Plums? How to make real Victorian sugar plums
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Dec 2024Purple, green, yellow, red, blue, and white hard candies with cherry centers
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1865Sugar plums go hand-in-hand with Christmas, but what exactly are they? There are recipes out there for a confection made of dried fruit and nuts that’s rolled into balls, but true Victorian sugar plums were a kind of candy made up of layers of hardened sugar syrup and gum arabic surrounding a fruit or nut core. They were pretty much the same thing as Jordan almonds.
You won’t find many recipes for them in Victorian-era cookbooks because no one really made them at home. The specialized equipment and labor involved meant that most people bought them from a confectioner, and I can see why.
Making these was a three-day endeavor for me, and I had to get a panning machine attachment for my stand mixer, and gum arabic, which I surprisingly didn’t already have in my pantry. They’re a nice sweet treat, but really more trouble than they’re worth to make at home.
Cherry Sugar-Plums. Set preserved cherries on a sieve in the stove. When they are partly dry, mix them with pounded sugar, and rub them over a sieve; dry them again, and proceed as with barberry sugar-plums.
Barberry Sugar-Plums. Take perfectly ripe barberries, stem them, dry them in a stove, and add the gum and sugar in the swinging basin. To accomplish this, after being heated in the stove, give them a coating of one part sugar, and one part gum arabic; and, when thoroughly moistened, powder with sifted sugar. Dry the coating in a stove; add a second on the next day, so as to completely cover the fruit; then thicken, and finish like the verdun sugar-plums. The fruit must be coated away from the fire. They are colored like the rose sugar-plums, and pearled like the lemon.
— The Art of Confectionery, 1865
December 26, 2025
QotD: In defence of fruitcake
To start, fruitcake has two important things going for it:
- Fruit.
- Cake.
As we all know, fruit is healthy. We are constantly being badgered by dietary experts to eat more fruit. What better source of fruit is there than fruitcake? Besides every other source, I mean.
I do think it’s important here to dispel an enduring myth that the fruit in today’s modern fruitcakes is infused with colossal amounts of sugar.
That is a lie.
It is glacéed with colossal amounts of sugar, which is an entirely different process that involves speaking French.
Okay, I am willing to admit that the fruit you typically find in fruit cake these days, assuming you find any, has been … glacéed with so much sugar it resembles Gummies more than fruit, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that it has the word “fruit” in it, so when your doctor asks you if you’ve been eating fruit you can give him an answer that won’t necessarily require a visit to confessional both and a half dozen Our Fathers.
[…]
Fruitcake has a long history, dating back as far as the Egyptians and has played a role in shaping our lives to this very day. Roman legions used an early form of fruitcake called satura to fuel their expansion. Did they rely on kale salads and quinoa? No, otherwise we’d all be speaking German by now. Or something.
Fruitcake is versatile as well, appropriate for both breakfast and dessert, bookending your busy day. Plus, how many desserts can you wrap up and give as an actual gift as opposed to just something you bring to a dinner party? Let’s just say you aren’t going to drop banana pudding in a FedEx box.
And yes, all jokes aside, it really can be used as a doorstop. You can’t say that about peach flambé, if only for the safety hazard.
“One of our writers was crazy enough to pen this defense of fruitcake, God bless him”, Not the Bee, 2022-12-19.
December 25, 2025
QotD: Christmas dinner
It is a simple recipe for happiness. First the meal, then the antidote, then another meal. The ancient Romans were the great masters of this technique. However, having just looked up the word vomitorium in the Latin dictionary, I find that after all it does not mean a place where you went to be sick after dinner. So perhaps this was not a normal feature of every Roman home, as is commonly believed.
Implied in the above-mentioned advertisement is the notion that a good meal means a meal at which you overeat yourself. In principle I agree. I only add in passing that when we gorge ourselves this Christmas, if we do get the chance to gorge ourselves, it is worth giving a thought to the thousand million human beings, or thereabouts, who will be doing no such thing. For in the long run our Christmas dinners would be safer if we could make sure that everyone else had a Christmas dinner as well. But I will come back to that presently.
The only reasonable motive for not overeating at Christmas would be that somebody else needs the food more than you do. A deliberately austere Christmas would be an absurdity. The whole point of Christmas is that it is a debauch — as it was probably long before the birth of Christ was arbitrarily fixed at that date. Children know this very well. From their point of view Christmas is not a day of temperate enjoyment, but of fierce pleasures which they are quite willing to pay for with a certain amount of pain. The awakening at about 4 a.m. to inspect your stockings; the quarrels over toys all through the morning, and the exciting whiffs of mincemeat and sage-and-onions escaping from the kitchen door; the battle with enormous platefuls of turkey, and the pulling of the wishbone; the darkening of the windows and the entry of the flaming plum pudding; the hurry to make sure that everyone has a piece on his plate while the brandy is still alight; the momentary panic when it is rumoured that Baby has swallowed the threepenny bit; the stupor all through the afternoon; the Christmas cake with almond icing an inch thick; the peevishness next morning and the castor oil on December 27th — it is an up-and-down business, by no means all pleasant, but well worth while for the sake of its more dramatic moments.
Teetotallers and vegetarians are always scandalized by this attitude. As they see it, the only rational objective is to avoid pain and to stay alive as long as possible. If you refrain from drinking alcohol, or eating meat, or whatever it is, you may expect to live an extra five years, while if you overeat or overdrink you will pay for it in acute physical pain on the following day. Surely it follows that all excesses, even a one-a-year outbreak such as Christmas, should be avoided as a matter of course?
Actually it doesn’t follow at all. One may decide, with full knowledge of what one is doing, that an occasional good time is worth the damage it inflicts on one’s liver. For health is not the only thing that matters: friendship, hospitality, and the heightened spirits and change of outlook that one gets by eating and drinking in good company are also valuable. I doubt whether, on balance, even outright drunkenness does harm, provided it is infrequent — twice a year, say. The whole experience, including the repentance afterwards, makes a sort of break in one’s mental routine, comparable to a week-end in a foreign country, which is probably beneficial.
George Orwell, “In praise of Christmas”, Tribune, 1946-12-20.
