Christmas isn’t really celebrated in China – there are still decorations in the shop windows and the trees lining the major roads have been beautifully covered in lights, but there’s no great understanding of quite how important a holiday it is in the West.
Inflatable Santa
My decision to make a traditional Christmas lunch was made before actually scoping out the shops so I was happy to find a red and white display at the entrance to the food court. Unfortunately this turned out to be a promotion for Lindt chocolates so I sampled a taster and ventured in further.
Vegetables were easy enough. Buried in amongst the multitude of far tastier Chinese standards I found the more usual suspects: carrots, peas, onions and sprouts. Savoy cabbage doesn’t seem to be available here so bought the flat type and finally found potatoes. These were small, organic and wrapped in twos, for about £1.50 a pack, so ended up with 16 for probably the same price as a few kilos at home.
In the dried nuts and fruits section I had to pull out my dictionary to identify cranberries, and a bit of pointing later I was issued with a couple of scoops. Same game again for some pork mince from the butchers section. It was also at the butchers I tried to get a fresh turkey, but its’ not popular here and the smallest they had was frozen and over 15kgs which, assuming I could defrost it in time, would mean we’d be eating leftovers for a week. He did offer to cut the smallest one in half, but I couldn’t really think where I’d then put the stuffing so bought a goose instead, which would hopefully better serve the pricey potatoes.
Decorations at The Place, Chaoyang, Beijing
In the frozen section I was happy to find a pack of traditional ‘German Cumberland sausages’ and some streaky bacon for the pigs-in-blankets.
Further in there was a small occasional table laid out with Christmas essentials including tinned cranberry sauce, Terry’s chocolate orange, guacamole and aspirin. I settled for the first two and headed to the checkouts.
Cooking it all was pretty straightforward, but the pleasure was far more in explaining the various elements and traditions to my guests, who usually spend meals helping me identify unknown bits of ducks and guts. I think to Chinese tastes the meat and vegetables were a bit unexciting, but they loved the cranberry and apple flavoured pork stuffing and the roast potatoes. I was happy with all of it except maybe the German Cumberland sausages could have been a bit more flavourful. And more British.
Boxing Day is unheard of in China so was a far more relaxing affair, with lunch at a roast duck restaurant, followed by an afternoon catching up on Christmas TV thanks to iPlayer and a VPN.
“Boxing Day is unheard of in China” as is.. you know the whole she-bang, but I think the 31st is generally understood to be noisy around the world for some reason……