12 Days of Christmas Reads — The Christmas Chronicles by Nigel Slater

Welcome to a bookish celebration of the Christmas season! For 12 days in December, I’m highlighting a book a day that puts the holiday season front and center of the narrative. You’ll find romances, women’s fiction, and much, much more! For day three, I’m sharing a favorite cookbook that’s about so much more than just cooking.

The Christmas Chronicles is the story of Nigel Slater’s love for winter, the scent of fir and spruce, ghost stories read with a glass of sloe gin, and beeswax candles with shadows dancing on the ceiling. With recipes, decorations, fables and quick fireside suppers, Nigel guides you through the essential preparations for Christmas and the New Year, with everything you need to enjoy the winter months.

Taking you from 1 November all the way to the end of January, The Christmas Chronicles covers everything from Bonfire Night, Christmas and New Year to Epiphany. Throughout the season, Nigel offers over 100 recipes to see you through the build-up, the celebrations and the aftermath. Here are much-loved classics such as goose and turkey (and making the most of the leftovers), mincemeat and the cake; recipes to make the cold months bearable, like ribsticker bread pudding with Comté and Taleggio, salt crust potatoes with blue cheese and goat’s curd, and hot-smoked salmon, potatoes and dill; as well as bright flavours to welcome the new year, including pink grapefruit marmalade, pear and pickled radish salad and rye, linseed and treacle bread.

Packed with feasts, folktales, myths and memoir and all told in Nigel’s warm and intimate signature style, The Christmas Chronicles is the only book you’ll ever need for winter.

I love cookbooks, and I frequently read them cover-to-cover in the same way that I would a novel. I’ve been a fan of Nigel Slater’s ever since I started watching his quirky cooking shows on the BBC. Then I read and started cooking out of The Kitchen Diaries series, and I absolutely fell in love with his lyrical style and beautiful observations about cooking, gardening, and lifestyle.

The Christmas Chronicles is a mixture of recipes, observations about the holiday season, and entertaining tips. Slater can be particular and picky, but that just adds to the whole “thing” that he’s doing. I recently gave a copy of this book to my mother, and we’ve both been cooking—and reading—our way through the holidays.

Check back tomorrow for the next edition of the 12 Days of Christmas Reads. If you want to see all of the 12 Days of Christmas Reads recommendations in one place, you can check out this handy landing page or sign up for my newsletter.

The Love in Food

An earlier version of this post appeared on the One Week in Love website. I grew up knowing that food is love. My mother taught me how to cook. I remember standing in the kitchen on weeknight, following her around as she showed me how to roast a chicken, or bustling around at a dinner party, making a stew stretch to feed an unexpected guest. My father taught me how to bake. He would let me kneed bread dough and roll out pie crusts with my childish hands, making me feel very grown up because this food was actually going to feed people.

Later, in college where dorm cafeteria meals are meant to get you through the day rather than satisfy the inner foodie in you, I would cook for my friends. Big pots of spaghetti Bolognese and chicken noodle soup would come steaming off of my dorm’s tiny electric stove. We would pile up mismatched plates and bowls to eat together in the lounge with our eclectic family chosen out of the people we loved best at school.

When I moved to New York for graduate school and then work, I learned to cook in a miniscule New York studio apartment in Morningside Heights with a kitchen that didn’t have an inch of counter space. I’d host little dinner and cocktail parties, feeling very grown up that all of my plates and dishes matched. That I had glassware was seen as a sign of maturity.

Now I cook for my boyfriend, a man doesn’t turn on the stove except to insist on making me a hot breakfast before I head to work. I started cooking for him within a few weeks of us meeting, teaching him little things here and there in the kitchen because he wanted to learn. But more than anything, I wanted to feed him. All my life, I’ve understood that we feed the people we care about because food is about more than sustenance.

Right in the middle of my novella “The Wedding Week”, Chris cooks for Annie. He’s a chef, so I knew it would be important for him to show his love of the heroine through food. It’s his language. I wound up writing a scene I think of as being deceptively intimate. Right in the middle of the book, Chris rolls out of Annie’s bed and makes he tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. But the scene isn’t just about amazing, post-coital food preparation. It’s an early sign of what the reader already suspects: Chris is already falling for Annie.

I’ve gotten a couple of requests from early readers to share Chris’ romantic but simple tomato soup recipe, so here it is. I only hope you will make it for someone you love whether husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, child, parent, or friend.

Tuscan Roasted Tomato Soup

Adapted from 5 Ingredient Fix: Easy, Elegant, and Irresistible Recipes, by Claire Robinson 

Ingredients

1 pound vine ripened tomatoes, seeded and quartered*

2 whole garlic cloves, peeled

2 tablespoons olive oil

One 28-ounce can crushed San Marzano tomatoes

1 ½ cups water

1/3 cup basil leaves, chopped finely

Salt & pepper to taste

Preheat over to 400.

Toss chopped, fresh tomatoes with olive oil, salt, and pepper on a rimmed baking sheet. Add whole garlic cloves. Roast in oven for 15 minutes until tomatoes start to shrivel and their sweetness concentrates.

While tomatoes are cooking, add San Marzano tomatoes and water to a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add basil and stir. Bring to a boil, then reduce head to medium-low and simmer for about 15 minutes.

Once tomatoes are done, remove from oven and reserve garlic cloves. Add to the pot with all cooking juices. Smash garlic with the flat of a knife, and chop finely into a paste. Add to soup. Simmer for another three minutes. Adjust seasonings to taste. Ladle into bowls and serve immediately alongside grilled cheese sandwiches.

This soup freezes well.

*I often make this recipe in the winter when tomatoes are out of season and the greenhouse grown ones are prohibitively expensive. During those months, ripe grape tomatoes sliced in half make a great alternative.

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