Dickens' Christmas

by

Bruce Kraig

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Much of our American Christmas holiday imagery comes from the Victorian era, named for the reign of Britain’s Queen Victoria (1837-1901). The Christmas tree is one, jolly Santa Claus another. But the season’s sentiments surely were fixed in the most beloved of all Christmas tales, Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" (1843). The story filled with sentiment and pity, personal regeneration, moral uplift, and a glimpse into social life at the time. The work also happens to be one of literature’s great food tales. The story begins with Christmas Eve indigestion. Ebenezer Scrooge has had dinner “in his usual melancholy tavern” and lies abed expecting a quiet sleep. But strange noises and Jacob Marley’s ghost soon end that. Perhaps, Scrooge hopes, the cause is an “undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato” or the gravy that he had eaten. “There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” the old miser declares. He was wrong, as we all know, but his beef dinner was not unusual. Beef was the food of even the poorest folk, for as Dickens tells us, even the poor tailor, “stirred up tomorrow's pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.” Meat stands at the center of all feasts, from low to high. Dickens was seriously interested in food and gave his hungry fellow Victorians a gourmand’s dream. The gigantic Ghost of Christmas Present appears to Scrooge amid: “... turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn [boar meat], great joints of meat, suckling pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red hot chestnuts, cherry cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth cakes, and seething 

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bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.” Was Dickens exaggerating such a spread? Restaurant and hotel dining room menus of the 19th century and records of wealthy families’ dinners say not. Dickens’ list is class-bound and very much of its period. But aside from the once ubiquitous oysters, the basic ingredients are familiar. The main difference is a rich, heavy, long-steamed plum pudding. Even the poorest Victorian English families had to have their pudding. The central food scene in A Christmas Carol is Christmas dinner at poor Bob Cratchit’s small four-room home. The joy of eating within the warm embrace of family has rarely been better portrayed. The main course is an onion and sage dressed goose which, incidentally, had been cooked at the local baker’s shop because like most people of few means they did not have a large enough oven. The family even has to do its steamed pudding in the outdoor wash house where Tiny Tim is taken to hear it “singing in the cop per.” Mrs. Cratchit fixes the rest of the meal in their tiny kitchen--- mashed potatoes with gravy and applesauce followed by chestnuts roasted in the hearth accompanied by a hot punch. An economical meal, and all the better for it the author tells us, but for an impoverished family it was such a meal as never was. The Cratchit’s relatively meager dinner was more like our modern ones. We might eat more vegetables at holiday time today, but otherwise we share the same holiday eating sensibilities as our forebears. No wonder that our airwaves are filled with commercials for digestive remedies just as Victorian newspapers had numerous advertisements for “dyspepsia” cures.