Sybarite,
Are these dishes somewhat of a traditional English fare or common to the UK, or perhaps one of your specialty recipe's ? They sound scrumptious.
Thank you, Krummhorn.
Not really traditional dishes: the starter is based on a dish I've seen detailed a couple of times for scallops and chorizo, but the other half isn't fond of hard sausages, so I decided to change it to black pudding and add an apple purée. All those ingredients are native to the UK, so I suppose in that sense it is traditional.
Venison is certainly traditional the chocolate sauce is a Gordon Ramsey thing that I've done before; the idea comes from the Aztecs and Incas who used chocolate as a savoury flavouring (it has to be at least 70% cocoa solids quite bitter).
Poached pears are pretty traditionally English (possibly originally French, but because of the mongrel nature of the UK, we have so many influences in our cooking), while the creme Catalana is a Catalan equivalent of crème brûlée where, in essence, the custard is flavoured with orange.
Recent tradition in the UK has seen roast turkey as the main Christmas Day meal usually with roast potatoes, carrots, sprouts (which very few people actually like although I do), stuffing, pork sausages (sometimes called 'pigs in blankets', if they've been wrapped in bacon and then pastry), with gravy and possibly cranberry jelly (if you're really sophisticated
).
This is followed by
Christmas pudding and custard. All of which is designed to make you feel thoroughly stuffed and incapable of moving from in front of the telly during the Queen's speech and then the millionth screening of
The Great Escape. The remaining turkey can be recycled in sandwiches that night and for days afterward in a variety of dishes (including turkey curry and turkey croquettes and turkey pasta), if the bird is big enough and depending on the number of people around and how much the cook really wants to bore them to culinary death.
This is all really quite a recent development at one time there would have been a lot more game used possibly venison, roast boar, goose. And unfortunately, most turkeys in the UK tend to be very bland and quite dry.
As I mentioned earlier, there is only me and my other half (plus three moggies), and neither of us enjoy the turkey route plus it would be a ridiculously large bird for two, even allowing titbits for the pride. I've often done duck, but in the last few years I've tried to branch out a bit further. We had wild boar last year and venison the year before that.
