How to annoy a food lover at Christmas
December 19, 2015 by Darcie
Food lovers are a fussy group. They eschew the ordinary in favor of the exotic, and their refined palates are difficult to please. At least that seems to be the opinion of William Sitwell, who writes in The Telegraph about how to annoy a food lover at Christmas.
Sitwell notes that one way to offend a gourmand is to boil Brussels sprouts. “Sprouts are the lovely, sweet, child-like cousins of cabbage. They are pretty little things and need to be treated with care and respect. They should not be boiled to death like some invading missionary,” he says. Sitwell elaborates on other ways to annoy, like having Christmas dinner early, or serving turkey for Christmas lunch.
These tongue-in-cheek descriptions paint food lovers as effete snobs who despair at changing their meal schedule to accommodate friends and relatives. I would hope that no guest would disdain a friend’s wine selection or be annoyed that they served turkey. However, it’s possible I cringed while reading this because a few points hit too close to home (sprouts really should never be boiled and yeah, the turkey is overcooked).
One item I could not disagree with more, however: the thought that a food lover wouldn’t want to receive a cookbook for Christmas. Says Sitwell: “We are a discerning bunch, we have made informed decisions about which of the 643 million cookbooks that were published in the last eight weeks we want. And that means that, sorry, we don’t want the 700 recipes Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson gifts the world in his Nordic Cookbook.” Maybe I wouldn’t seek out that particular tome, but if someone gave it to me, it would be welcome on my bookshelf. What about you?
William Sitwell is the editor of Waitrose Kitchen for which every issue ever published is indexed on EYB.
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