All I Want for Christmas Is My Old Roast Beef

Three faces are in my face. The kids. It’s Christmas morning. The clock says 5 a.m., but it feels like a jingle-bell 4 a.m.

Sweet morning breath says, “Mom, get up. We have to open the presents.”

“OK, OK,” I say. “In a minute.”

But I get up, find my robe, snap a bobby pin in my Phyllis Diller 5 a.m. hair and try to pry open my eyelids.

I want to tell them, “Merry Christmas, sweet darlings. Let’s open the presents together, my dears.”

“Ugh . . . “ is what comes out.

Christmas paper and boxes are everywhere. Ribbons fly in the air; kids’ voices reach high regions of “screech.” And my head aches. This is a real 5 a.m. double-dose Excedrin migraine. Probably because the Midnight church service the night before brought us home at 2 a.m. But it’s good to see the kids having fun and I pad over to the stove and start the percolator. Maxwell House. Yuban. Chockful o’ Nuts some years. Jamaican Blue Mountain after a trip to Japan. A silly blended coffee one year. Maxwell House Masterblend now; sometimes Slow Roast.

As my husband drops into the easy chair, a sheet as big as the newspaper is pushed in his face. They are instructions to assemble a man-size ROTOTILLERBIGMACTRUCK. “Later,” he says, snapping up his third cup of morning coffee and laying his head back carefully on the head rest. He also has a church-bell headache.

We ooh and aah over the children’s gifts, cackle over the ones Aunt Terry sent.

That’s the fun part. Now comes the rest of the day. The cooking and cleaning; breakfast and snacks; getting the kids bathed and dressed; running to the store for forgotten items, answering the phone; making present-delivery runs, driving little Ben to Mike’s house, little Marya to Kelly’s. There’s the table to set, the last-minute silver polishing I always seem to forget, my bath, my hair, my makeup and the what-in-the-world-do-I-wear-this-year dilemma that ticks away precious minutes best reserved for last-minute cooking. And the menu.

The menu always varies. During my Japanese period I turned my house into a rice-paper temple and my cooking into a Zen abstraction. My Christmas menu that year began with sushi. The kids wanted roast beef. And, frankly, so did I.

It was my infatuation with France, which began in the ‘50s and ended in the ‘60s, that sparked the first of many 120-degree turns in home decor and cooking. We went from I-won-it-on-The-Price-Is-Right Colonial maple to Auntie Mame Directoire, complete with gilded moldings, trompe l’oeil murals, valances that cascaded dramatically onto the floor and Empress Josephine furniture (do two chairs qualify?). Our food went from tuna casserole to supremes de volaille a la parisienne and filets de sole a la bonne femme. Christmases those years were installations rather than cooking. With vegetables and edible flowers, I created miniature Tuileries for the plate. The turkey in those years looked as if it had walked out of the Fauchon window, decked in tiny floral cutouts of carrot, turnips and strands of chives. Chaud-froid de saumon became a white-Christmas centerpiece, decorated with green and red pepper geometric cutouts. The kids loved collecting the cutouts and using them like stick-ons for their plates--and foreheads.

My Italian period, which ran a three- or four-year course, almost always included a complete menu from some palace in Venice. One year, a first course of seared duck’s liver was served on a bed of chopped radicchio in balsamic vinaigrette; penne came in a dome of pie crust; quail rested in a nest of matchstick potatoes. There was chestnut-carrot puree, timbales of rice with porcini mushrooms, and a dessert of cannoli made with homemade filbert wafers stuffed with mascarpone and candied fruit. It was lovely, but the kids “yucked” the duck liver . . . and the radicchio . . . and the porcini rice. They’d have preferred roast beef.

When I finally discovered American cooking there was roast beef--and goose. Sometimes chicken and game too. And for each roast beef/goose year, I consulted turn-of-the-century American Christmas menus and recipes from my newly acquired Boston Cooking School Magazines of 1890 to 1910 circulation, which I inherited from our neighbor.

The holiday menus were elaborate, 20 to 25 dishes in all, counting the condiments and customary three or four desserts. Diners at the turn of the century were anything but diet-minded. And so, we dined guiltlessly on those roast beef Christmases.

There was consomme with okra slices, roast goose with prune stuffing, cranberry granite. One year I added a fillet of venison with Bernaise sauce to the goose menu. The desserts were steamed plum pudding with both hard and liquid sauces, green apple pie and mince pie served with burnt-almond ice cream.

One year I prepared chestnut pudding, which flopped because the measures and methods of cooking differed greatly in old-time recipes. Then there was a cake with marshmallow frosting that burned to carbon crisp. Measures given in the recipes were sometimes inexact, often “rounded,” or “generous” or “heaping.” Sometimes there were no measures at all--just the ingredients, which tells you that recipe publishers in those days had more confidence in their readers’ culinary skills than ours do today. And with good reason. I learned (not quickly enough) to use my own common sense when applying recipe measures and cooking times.

One year’s Christmas dinner, out of the December, 1904 cookbook, started with alphabet chicken broth soup and called for boiled shoulder of cod served with oyster sauce, which I switched with a 1905 menu calling for salmon mousse with oyster sauce. The entree was roast beef served with Franconia potatoes (oven roasted), creamed celery in Edam cheese shells (the small ones), baked Virginia ham, lettuce salad and sugared sweet potatoes. Somewhere between the ham and roast beef, I also added a cider frappe (or was it claret punch?) from a 1907 holiday issue, as a pleasing interlude to a huge menu.

One roast-beef Christmas I tried consomme with quenelles and peas, which everyone ate gingerly, not knowing what the game dumplings actually were. They tasted like Spam. The menu also called for fillet of fish in wine sauce. Instead of the roast goose called for in the menu I used roast beef and served it with the recommended apple croquettes, mashed potatoes, turnips au gratin , and, oddly, coleslaw as a salad. Turn-of-the-century hosts gave legitimacy to coleslaw as never again since. I think coleslaw should make a comeback for Christmas.

We still have roast beef Christmases from the assorted menus in the Boston Cooking School magazines. And probably more than the cooking, which is wildly difficult for one person (or even two persons) to accomplish without help, I most enjoy the planning of the menus, reliving and relishing the flavor from times past and the cooks, whom I could almost see patting pie dough at the cooking table or stirring a sauce at their Crawford Cooking Ranges. The eating, after all was said and done (two days cleaning up afterward is no joke), was great too. And the kids loved it. Still do whenever they visit.

SALMON MOUSSE

1/2 pound salmon fillets

2 egg yolks

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon flour

1/2 cup chicken stock

1/2 teaspoon chopped dill

Salt, pepper

1 cup whipping cream

2 egg whites

Paprika

Oyster Sauce

Place salmon in food processor and pulse to break up fillets. Add egg yolks. Process until smooth. Set aside.

Melt butter in saucepan over medium heat. Stir in flour. Gradually stir in chicken stock and cook, stirring, until thickened. Add to salmon mixture with dill. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Set aside.

Beat whipping cream until stiff. Add egg whites and beat until stiff. Fold egg-white mixture into fish mixture. Add paprika to taste. Turn into well-buttered or oiled individual 3-inch mousse molds. Set in pan of hot water and bake at 350 degrees 30 to 35 minutes or until mixture feels firm to touch. Do not allow water to boil around mold. Invert mold and serve with Oyster Sauce. Makes 6 servings.

Each serving contains about:

417 calories; 387 mg sodium; 232 mg cholesterol; 33 grams fat; 11 grams carbohydrates; 19 grams protein; 0 fiber; 71% calories from fat.

Oyster Sauce

1 pint shucked oysters

3 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons flour

1 cup half and half, about

1 teaspoon lemon juice

Salt, pepper

Paprika

Drain and chop oysters. Reserve liquor. Melt butter over medium heat and stir in flour. Gradually add half and half and cook, stirring until thickened. Slowly stir in oyster liquor and lemon juice. Season to taste with salt, pepper and paprika. If thinner sauce desired, add more half and half and heat through. Makes 6 servings.

RUTABAGAS AU GRATIN

3 rutabagas

Salt, pepper

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Cream Sauce

1/2 cup cracker crumbs

2 tablespoons melted butter

Peel and cut rutabagas in quarters lengthwise. Let stand in cold water until ready to cook. Drain.

Add rutabagas to boiling salted water and simmer 30 minutes, until tender. Drain and cut rutabagas into cubes (about 3 cups cubes).

Place rutabagas in au gratin dish and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Pour Cream Sauce over, carefully toss to mix without breaking vegetables. Mix cracker crumbs with melted butter and sprinkle over rutabagas. Bake at 400 degrees until browned, about 15 minutes, or brown under broiler just before serving. Makes 6 to 8 servings.

Cream Sauce

1/4 cup butter

1/4 cup flour

2 cups milk

Salt, pepper

Melt butter in skillet. Add flour, stirring until smooth. Gradually add milk. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring until thickened, about 7 to 8 minutes.

Each serving contains about:

229 calories; 363 mg sodium; 45 mg cholesterol; 16 grams fat; 16 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams protein; .9 gram fiber; 63% calories from fat.

CABINET PUDDING WITH BANANAS

1 loaf sponge cake

2 small bananas, peeled and sliced

3 eggs

1/2 cup sugar

2 cups milk

Dash salt

Currant Jelly Sauce

Thinly slice sponge cake. Arrange 1 layer of sponge cake slices in bottom and sides of well-buttered 5-cup mold. Arrange layer of banana slices over cake layer in bottom of pan. Continue to layer cake and bananas until mold is filled.

Beat eggs and sugar in bowl. Gradually add milk and salt. Pour over mold. Let stand few minutes to allow cake to absorb liquid. Cover mold and steam over pan of simmering water until custard set and pudding firm, about 60 minutes. Serve hot with Currant Jelly Sauce.

Currant Jelly Sauce

1 cup currant jelly

1 or 2 tablespoons Kirschwasser

Heat jelly until melted. Remove from heat and stir in Kirschwasser. Makes 1 cup.

Each serving contains about:

241 calories; 131 mg sodium; 147 mg cholesterol; 5 grams fat; 43 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams protein; .1 gram fiber; 18% calories from fat.