The Christmas Chronicles. Nigel Slater
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a whole new type of refreshment. Hot cider in a thick glass, frothy cocoa in a mug, buckwheat tea smelling of toast and warm rice. The drinks of winter smell different, of cloves and cinnamon, honey and fruit, rice and smoke, damson and cardamom.
I make my favourite winter drink in early autumn, so it is ready for Christmas. Damsons, squirrelled away in a bottle of gin, as happy as a fruit could ever be. (The recipe, by the way, is in Tender, Volume II.) I make cocoa thick and creamy, beaten to a froth with a little whisk, and serve it in deep mugs to keep it hot right to the end. It is part of the ritual of drinking cocoa that the first sip scalds your lips. Cardamom seeds, crushed beneath the weight of a pestle and mortar, have much to offer to a mug of hot, dark chocolate.
Apple drinks abound. Hot juice, mulled with cinnamon sticks and cloves; steaming cider with orange peel; cider brandy, sugar and cream. For the feast there are frivolous, sparkly things, sometimes flushed with pomegranate or blood orange and, occasionally, a hot toddy in a glass dotted with condensation. Even tea changes with the weather. The light green teas I drink in summer, welcome at any time of year, take a step back while the roasted teas, full of smoky notes and the humble cosy notes of toasted rice, take their place.
The alcohol level rises as the temperature dips. It is the only time of year the eaux-de-vie come out, the fruit liqueurs whose potency hides under a cloak of fruit and syrup.
My winters start with sight of the first damsons in the shops, the first bonfire lit. They end in late March when I take off to the coldest place I can find. And then, in an attempt to hold on to it all, I end up in Japan, Iceland or Finland. I eat a cup of crab soup in a hut on the harbour in Reykjavik or a thoughtful, foraged meal at one of my favourite restaurants in Helsinki, where each meal is peppered with Douglas fir or shoots of young green spruce, rowan berries picked from a tree in the churchyard, or an ice cream made from the young, green berries of juniper. Chef’s cooking, full of imagination and playfulness, and a world away from the simpler fodder I make at home. And then, full of the last tastes of winter, I step out into the cold for the last time.
The coldest winters
Some people remember summers. A holiday in Tuscany; a lunch outdoors that turned into dinner and ran long into the darkness; a picnic on the beach or the summer afternoon they lost their virginity.
I remember winters. I can trace my love of the cold months to one particular day. The winter of 1962–3, to be precise. Late afternoon, just as the sun went down and the sky slipped from apricot to scarlet to lavender. I was playing outside, a huge lump of snow that we had rolled down the silent street, getting larger and larger until we could roll it no further and which I then flattened to form a counter. I was playing shop, in duffel coat and mittens, with the food fashioned out of snow. A vast truckle of cheese from which I cut wedges to sell, a cake (of course) and snow sweets the size of pebbles. (There is a little shopkeeping in the family’s blood: in Victorian times we had a dairy in Birmingham.) My friends bought the snow cakes and then hurled them at one another as snowballs. I remember my mother bringing me in when she realised that every other kid had gone in for tea and I was still there, tending my snow shop.
The winter of 1962–3 was the coldest since 1895. I was six. It had been a particularly foggy late autumn and snow first arrived on December 12. The heaviest snow came on Boxing Day and by the 29th had drifted in some places to twenty feet deep. We had eighteen inches in Staffordshire. Villages were without power, people were stranded in their cars, the sea froze in parts of Kent and temperatures as low as –19°C were recorded. The lowest since 1814. I can’t ever remember having such fun as I did that winter, leaping into snowdrifts on my walk to school; building a snowman (carrot nose, lumps of coal for eyes) with my brother in the back garden; coming home soaked and freezing from having lost another snowball fight. It is no wonder that modern winters are something of a disappointment.
In truth Britain has had very few truly cold winters, especially in the south of the country. The coldest on record was 1684, the year the Thames froze over for two months and a fair was held on its frozen waters. The coldest of the last century have been 1940, 1947, 1963 and 1979.
Daily meteorological records began in the seventeenth century. Britain’s coldest include 1739–40, when snow started on Christmas Day and lasted to February 17, with temperatures as low as –9°C. London, usually one of the least snowy areas of the country, recorded thirty-nine days of snow. Two full months where the average temperature was less than 0°C were recorded.
1836 was one of the coldest but also a winter of floods, avalanches and stranded rail passengers. 1927–8 was a white Christmas, and with one of the heaviest snowfalls of the twentieth century. In 1933, forty-eight hours of continual snowfall were recorded.
The north, which takes the brunt of winter weather, did so especially in 1940, and was particularly cold. Four feet of snow fell in Sheffield, and the Thames froze for the first time since 1880. An ice storm hit the south on January 28.
The long winter of 1947 began in late January and lasted until mid-March. Many villages around the country were snowed in and thousands were cut off for days. Not especially cold, but a good one for snow, with not a single area of the country that didn’t record snowfall from January 22 to March 17. Many snowfalls measured 60cm or more, with Scotland recording drifts of seven metres. At one point the armed forces were brought in to rescue people.
1952–3 saw the highest winter loss of life this country has ever known during peacetime. The smog in London accounted for 12,000 deaths. 1962–3 is still the coldest I remember, and the coldest weather for 200 years. The sea froze in some parts of the country, and villages were cut off. Animals froze in their fields because farmers couldn’t gain access. A temperature of –22°C was recorded in Braemar in Scotland. The mean maximum temperature in January was –2°C, making it the coldest month since the 1800s. The Guardian reported that a farm in Dartmoor was cut off by snowdrifts for sixty-six days, and the owners had to be rescued by troops. It wasn’t until March that the temperatures climbed above –5°C. Glasgow recorded its first white Christmas since the 30s.
The scent of winter
Scent always seems particularly intense to me in winter. The smell of a toasted crumpet on a frosty morning. The sap from a branch, snapped in the garden, or of lemon zest grated in the kitchen, all seem especially vivid, heightened at this time of year. The cold air seems to illuminate scent.
Well, yes, and no. The cold actually reduces our ability to detect smells. Our body’s capacity to pick up the scent of something reduces on cold days partly because our odour receptors, all three to four hundred of them, protect themselves against freezing by burying themselves deeper in the nose. They snuggle down and are less ‘receptive’. It is like they can’t be bothered to get out of bed.
There is also less to smell in the winter, because odour molecules, denser in the cold, move more slowly in the air in the cool weather. So we actually smell fewer things. This may explain why the smells we do notice, the smoke from burning leaves or of roasting nuts, of a pot of marmalade bubbling on the hob or the Christmas tree being brought into the house, is more pronounced. Our nose is less confused with other smells.
Some things actually smell cold. Snow, obviously, but also peppermint, cucumber, yoghurt, ginger and juniper. They make us feel cool. But there are also smells that don’t actually smell of winter, but simply make us think of it, things that we connect with this season alone. A tray of mince pies in the oven; an orange studded with cloves; dumplings swelling in the damp wood of a Chinese steamer; or a shallow dish of potato Dauphinoise, calm and creamy, baking. There are the winter herbs, of course, bay, rosemary and thyme, the aromatics that weave their magic in stock or meat juices over time rather than the instant hit of torn basil or coriander. The comforting ‘sugar smells’ of warm treacle, toffee, butterscotch and liquorice. Of marmalade and caramel.
I don’t like the smell of mulled wine, it reminds me of cheap pot-pourri. But the zest of an orange mingled with the warmth of cloves is certainly a part of any catalogue of winter scents. All the more when it comes in the form of a Seville orange. The lumpy, bitter sort needed for classic duck à l’orange and for marmalade. More pleasing, I think, is that of orange blossom, preferably caught on a breeze rather than from a bottle.