Get ready for Christmas with these essential Elizabeth David recipes

Elizabeth David is regarded as the most influential British food writer of the modern era. She transformed the culinary landscape of post-war Britain with an approach to cooking that drew inspiration from her Mediterranean travels—her books have inspired generations of chefs and food writers. We mark the festive season with this new collection of Elizabeth David’s Christmas recipes, selected exclusively for ckbk by her nephew, kitchen designer Johnny Grey. We’re featuring it as book of the month for December in our online cookbook club, #ckbkclub, so please do try out a recipe or two and share how you get on!

By Johnny Grey

These are a selection of the Christmas recipes I have used over the years from my aunt's book, Elizabeth David's Christmas. All have a winter as well as a Christmas feel to them and each has a special role as part of our family traditions as any good Christmas recipe should. My aunt's inspiration for writing the book was her solidarity with the women she saw bogged down by Christmas work—I suspect chief among these my mother with her five children. Elizabeth David points out in her Introduction that she really liked spending Christmas on her own, making an exception when visiting my family, her younger sister and all the children. She would bring round a stylish hamper of goodies on Christmas day and stay to eat with us. Initially this was lunch, later in my childhood dinner. She lived with her other younger sister Felicité, who would come along too. We all laughed a lot—Elizabeth David was witty—and Christmas spirit flowed.

The recipes

Prawn Paste
The ideal hors d’oeuvres for a Christmas Eve get-together. Enjoy while watching King’s College carols with a glass of Prosecco. Served on toasted sourdough, this traditional fish delicacy provides light luxury to gear up for the bigger treats to come.

Smoked Cod’s Roe Paste
Comforting as an alternative if you want a richer effect. Add thin cucumber slices and serve it with, for example, a light red or white Rhône.

Spiced Beef Loaf
As an alternative to the Spiced Beef recipe, this terrine is a perfect centrepiece for a light picnic-style lunch on Christmas day. It’s ideal with one of the soups below.

Pumpkin and celery soup
The celery adds a bittersweet flavour that balances out the simple sweetness of the pumpkin. I’d recommend serving this with a terrine, or cold meat and fresh or toasted sourdough.

Carrot soup
My favourite Christmas soup. I boost the amount of orange to counteract the sweetness of the carrot. Perfect for the light picnic-style lunch that some of us prefer while deferring the main Christmas feast for the evening.

Turkey stuffed with chestnuts and apples
This may be the simplest and most straightforwardly traditional of the roast turkey recipes. Collect your chestnuts in late October and keep them somewhere cool. Or buy them ready-prepared.

Roast pheasant with chestnut sauce
This alternative to turkey could be an old-fashioned contender for the Christmas dinner. With apple and cream sauce, this braised bird makes a worthy Boxing Day menu leader.

Spiced beef for Christmas
Spiced beef, even with its 10-day spicing experience, is the ultimate Elizabeth David Christmas fare. Cut in super thin slices and served with Oxford sauce, it gives a sense of a medieval castle banquet. I have a lifelong affection for this dish as it was always the star offering in the Christmas hamper Elizabeth David brought around to our house. All us children devoured this brown paper-wrapped parcel with its spicy outer layer, giving it no more than 24 hours in the larder even though it had theoretical lasting properties. Elizabeth David describes the flavours that include juniper, allspice and Jamaica pepper as ‘rich, mellow and spicy’. It’s a faff to do but once a year you don’t regret it. Surprisingly it has become a symbol of Christmas food in more households than just my family.

Cumberland sauce
I enjoy this a treat at Christmas because it partners so well with cooked meats, from gammon through turkey. The ingredients of mustard, wine vinegar, port, ground ginger, oranges, lemons and red currant jelly, work together a delicate magic.

Oxford sauce (also known as Oxford Brawn sauce)
My favourite of all the meat accompaniments. The classic combination of mustard and brown sugar works so beautifully to enhance the textures and deep flavours of the meat.

Endives cooked in butter
Amongst the underused veggie gang in the middle of the book, this is a striking recipe. Adding the celery gives it a textural range along with the stock—or cream in a richer version as a delicious complement to turkey or white meat. Alternatively, whizz the cooked vegetables up and turn them into a puree thickened with egg yolk and lemon. Wow.

Torrone Molle
Here I have to summarise Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. When he made this for Elizabeth David while learning his craft at the River Café he upped the chocolate content. On serving it his customer immediately noticed and called for his attention back at her table. With some trepidation he returned to be told, after a short pause that might have seemed long, that she actually approved of his modification. Apparently this was one of the great moments of his cookery career. Torrone Molle really is the perfect chocolate cake, succulent, slightly stodgy, a chocolate zap of the highest order. 

Chocolate ice cream
The first recipe I cooked as a little boy was this one handed to me by Elizabeth David, typed on a piece of carbon copy paper. It simply pleases everyone, served soft and fresh, without crystallisation from being stored in the freezer. It’s worth serving it with luxury biscuits to extend the eating time.

Pears baked in red wine
The classic dark winter pudding and a receptacle for thick cream. As pears get older, or are underripe imports, here’s a perfect use for them. I enjoy lots of cloves but these are optional. What isn’t, though, is candles on the table when you serve these softly gleaming ruby pears. 

Orange and almond cake
The orange gives this classic but easy-to-make cake a fresh and delicate flavour. It appeals to children and adults and is not a problem to make gluten-free by using GF-flour breadcrumbs. Serve it with Muscat de Beaumes de Venises and you’re heading for heaven.

Add the book to your favorites

Essential Elizabeth David (Christmas) is the first installment of a new compilation of the very best of Elizabeth David. Watch out for more classic Elizabeth David recipes on ckbk in the near future.

Featured recipes

About the author

Elizabeth David (1913–1992) was one of Britain’s most celebrated writers of food and cookery. She was a free-loving, anti-establishment, globe trotter, whose recipes documenting the cuisines of Greece, Egypt, France and Italy reinvigorated the culinary culture of post-war England’s middle class. David’s travels to Greece introduced her to the wonders of Mediterranean cuisine, which she shared with her readership through her column in the British magazine, Harper’s Bazaar. Her first work, A Book of Mediterranean Food, was a collection of these published recipes. David went on to write recipes on Italian and French cuisine making them more accessible to the average home cook, but her true culinary passion had always been for seasonal cuisines. This love for fresh, in-season ingredients was celebrated in her 1955 book, Summer Cooking. In the 1970’s David paid tribute to her English roots with the publication of Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen in 1970 and English Bread and Yeast Cookery in 1978.

Johnny Grey is a British interior designer and the author of several books on kitchen design. One of the first kitchens he designed was that of his aunt, Elizabeth David.

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