Curious Cook: December festivities
I was in Bulgaria recently during St. Nicholas’ Day, known locally as Nikulden, which is a significant winter festival celebrated every 6th of December. St. Nicholas is one of the most revered Christian saints in Bulgaria, with many churches and monasteries dedicated to him.

He is particularly honoured as the patron saint of sailors, fishermen, oceans, seas, and rivers. Therefore, the day holds special importance in Bulgarian culture, making it a day of feasts, entertainment, and family gatherings.

Traditionally, Bulgarians celebrate St. Nicholas’ Day with a festive dinner, where fish dishes, particularly carp stuffed with rice, walnuts, and onions, are commonly served.

Other customs

There are a wide variety of interesting ways to celebrate the Christmas holidays around the world, apart from the usual large bird roasts like turkey in the United States and Britain, and even the capon in France.

For example, Sweden’s traditional Christmas dinner is called a Julbord, a buffet of cold fish, cold meats, cheese, pickles, and cuts from a serious ham called Julskinka. Preparing this ham is a labour of love; it takes several days to brine a hunk of salt-cured fatty pork meat, which is then cooked (boiled or baked), cooled down, glazed with a mix of egg yolks, mustard, and breadcrumbs, and then baked until the glaze is golden and crispy.

Seafood dishes like fritto misto are popular during Christmas in Italy. — ALEX FAVALI/Pexels

Italians prefer to serve the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve, as a way of paying homage to the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. The seven dishes can vary considerably but typically may include stuffed clams, cold seafood salads, scampi, stuffed calamari, fritto misto (fried seafood), fish and vegetable stew, roasted garlic and herb shrimp, etc.

For Christmas feasts, the Danes like flæskesteg, which is roast pork with crispy crackling, often served with brunede kartofler which are small potatoes caramelised in sugar. Flæskesteg is the base for a delicious hearty dinner, and one day we might try making the risalamande, a rice pudding served with whipped cream, almonds, vanilla, and cherry sauce.Icelandic people typically have a “Yule meal” of roast leg of lamb and laufabrauð (or “leaf bread”), an intriguingly thin crispy flatbread cut into delicate patterns and then fried. The lamb in Iceland is not the normal species one would find in common supermarkets but a pure breed brought over in the 9th-10th century from Norway and raised locally since then. It is very much a gourmet meat, and stunningly delicious.

In Poland, the Christmas Eve dinner is often meat-free, and the meal begins when the first star appears in the evening. It is a 12-dish feast, representing the 12 apostles and the 12 months of the year, and opens with a brightly-coloured beet soup called barszez, followed by various dishes such as pierogi (steamed or boiled Polish-version of wontons), mushroom dumplings called uszka, carp (the meal is meat-free but not fish-free), and various other sweets, including poppy seed desserts.

Goa in India was a Portuguese colony for several centuries and a sizable population there celebrates Christmas by serving a spicy stew called sorpotel, a pork (including offal such as liver and heart) dish slow-cooked in cinnamon, cumin, and various fiery chillies. The heat from the dish is often later countered by sana, which are coconut cakes infused with liqueurs.

The Catalonia region of Spain celebrates Christmas lunch with a sopa de galets, a hearty soup where meatballs compete for space with giant pasta shells in a complicated broth made by slowly simmering ham and beef bones, chicken breast meat, pig trotters, and various vegetables for many hours. Then freshly minced beef and pork rolled into meatballs are plonked into the broth to cook with giant pasta shells called galets.

Sopa de galets is a full-flavoured traditional Catalonian Christmas dish that is typically slow-cooked for hours to extract maximum flavour. — Filepic

Christmas in Ethiopia is called Ganna and is celebrated on the 7th of January after a 43-day fast.

The feast after the fast usually includes the national dish rooster doro wat, a flavoursome chicken stew cooked with an Ethiopian spice mix called berbere (which contains fenugreek, cardamon, coriander, and other local spices) and lots of clarified butter. No cutlery is needed for this dish as it is usually eaten by hand with the help of lots of injera, a soft fermented flatbread.

South Africans serve a particularly decadent dessert for Christmas called Malva pudding. This dessert is also served on other special occasions and is basically a sponge cake layered with apricot jam. However, for Christmas, it is also drenched in brandy or Amarula, a liqueur made from the local marula fruit. Then while the pudding is still warm, it is additionally coated with a thick sweet butter-cream sauce, turning the cake into a dense gooey sugary alcoholic pudding, ideal for people who like cardiovascular events.

Many people would know about the Italian penchant for panettone during Christmas but in Sicily, they prefer buccellato, a round cake made with figs, almonds, and pine nuts. It has an unusual distinctive flavour due to the addition of marsala wine to the pastry dough before baking.

An unusual Christmas dish that dates back thousands of years before Christ is the Ukrainian porridge dish called kutya. Traditionally, kutya is a bowl of boiled wheatberries, poppy seeds, and honey, but walnuts and various dried fruits are now often included. It is the most important of the 12 deeply symbolic dishes served in Ukraine for Christmas. The others include dishes such as varenyky (stuffed dumplings), holubtsi (stuffed cabbage rolls), solyanka (sweet and sour fish soup), kolach (a braided round bread), etc.

And the weirdest, most recent Christmas “tradition” may be found in Japan where it seems millions of Japanese just need to eat fast food chicken for Christmas. This fad began in the 1970s when the first KFC shops opened in Japan and a canny store owner started to offer a “Christmas party barrel” as a promotion. As a country with no previous Christmas traditions, the Japanese adopted this Christmas practice wholeheartedly and now KFC Christmas barrels need to be ordered up to two months in advance, possibly helping to raise the incidence of heart disease in the country.

Interesting device

I came across an interesting device invented in 2021 by Professor Homei Miyashita of Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. The device is called Taste The TV (TTTV) which the inventor claims can simulate food flavours, allowing users to literally taste what they see on the screen.

TTTV operates through a carousel of 10 flavour canisters that are programmatically controlled to spray onto a targeted spot in combination to recreate the taste of a particular food.

The flavour sample from the target is then transferred onto a hygienic film, which is rolled over a flat TV screen, enabling the viewer to see the “food” and then taste the simulated flavor by placing the tongue on the film over the screen.

In South Africa, a dessert called Malva pudding is served during Christmas time, the highlight being that it is drenched in brandy. — CHARMAINE ZOE/Flickr

It might be easy to dismiss Miyashita’s fanciful idea of recreating all kinds of taste sensations using only 10 canisters of flavours, but he has been working on the subject for more than a decade. In 2011, he published a paper called Augmented Gustation Using Electricity where electrical charges applied to chopsticks and drinking straws were found to change or enhance the sensation of various tastes in the human tongue while ingesting food, claiming to be able to “use electric taste actively as a new seasoning to augment gustation”.

Personally, I found his claim that TTTV can remotely train people to become sommeliers to be a little far-fetched mainly because wine appreciation is far more than simple gustatory sensations. There are very significant elements of olfactory and texture sensory interactions involved in understanding wines, and I cannot imagine licking a film of plastic can convey the aroma of a claret nor the creamy texture of a well-aged wine. Also, one would suggest that many foods have unique qualities that cannot be synthesized under any circumstance.

An example may be the tingling sensation of Sichuan peppers, which induces a very curious sensation called paresthesia in the tongue and lips. This is due to a compound called hydroxy-alpha-sanshool, which causes parts of the mouth to experience a vibrational frequency of 50 Hz (50 times a second) in the mouth.

So sadly, although TTTV may be usable for simpler taste sensations, it is highly unlikely that it can ever be adapted to conveying the joy of, for example, eating a flæskesteg in Denmark.

Have a happy holiday season!

The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
Curious Cook,Chris Chan,Christmas meals
The columnist looks at what people all over the world tuck into for Christmas.