Christmas Cookery Made Easy

'Christmas is comig, the goose is getting fat', or so the rhyme goes... The truth is that it's the beginning of November and already it's time for cooks to begin thinking about their Christmas recipes. Now is the time to begin baking your Christmas cakes and Christmas puddings. This is why the Celtnet Christmas Recipes page is brought to you now.

Here you will find Christmas and midwinter recipes from all the way down the ages. Everything from Ancient Celtic midwinter festival fods to Medieval and Elizabethan foods, Victorian Foods and Modern foods. The whole history of Christmas and Midwinter Cookery is given. You will see how dishes like Victorian plum pudding became the classic Christmas Pudding and how Twelfth Night cakes evolved across Europe and became the classic modern Christmas Cake.

As well as these recipes you also get European recipes for classic Christmas cakes such as Stollen and King Cake as well as recipes for mulled drinks, eggnog, Wassail and ales. Just to whet your appetite here's my recipe for the Classic Milanes Christmas bread, Panettone:

Panettone

Ingredients

450g Strong White Bread Flour
1 tsp Sugar
1 tsp Salt
1 Lemon (grated zest of)
50g Pine Nuts
50g Raisins
50g Mixed Peel
1 x 7g sachet Dried Yeast
1 Egg, beaten
25g Butter (melted)
200ml warm Water

To Glaze:
Butter (melted)
2 Eggs (beaten)

Place all the in gredients in a bowl and mix thoroughly. Alternately, place in a mixer's bowl, attach a dough hook and mix the ingredients to a soft dough. Knead for 5 minutes. If mixing by hand tip the dough onto a floured surface and knead for 10 minutes.

Place the dough into a round, well greased tin, about 18cm in diameter and 9 cm deep. Cover, and place in a warm place to prove until doubled in size (at least 2 hours).

Once well risen place the cake in an oven pre-heated to 190°C and bake for 30 minutes. Take the cake out of the oven and immediately brush with a mix of butter and eggs. Traditionally the panettone is held upside down to cool so that the lightness of the cake is maintained.

You will find loads more Christmas cakes as well as recipes for Turkey or Goose with all the trimmings on the Celtnet site

Dyfed Lloyd Evans is the webmaster and author of the Celtnet Recipes recipe sites which specializes in recipes from all over the world. As part of the 'seasonal recipes' section of the site all the Christmas recipes have now been pulled together into the Celtnet Christmas Recipes page.