When it comes to culinary delights Charles Dickens is a master of description. A Christmas Carol is full with delicious Xmas food: geese and game, mince pies and oysters, apples and oranges, raisins and figs are laid out before the reader in such a way as to evoke the Christmas cheer of Victorian London from the street markets to the poor man's humble festive dinner.
Dickens quotes on Xmas food also serve as a way of contrast between the rich colours, textures and smells of the culinary delights and the mean, cold and dark life of the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge; Scrooge who takes his "melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern" and returns to his gloomy, dark, cold rooms where a little saucepan of gruel lies on the bare table.
Xmas Food and Culinary Delights in A Christmas Carol
When the Spirit of Christmas Present visits Ebenezer Scrooge, a feast of culinary delights takes place. It is a feast for the eyes and the senses: a mighty blaze is roaring in the hearth, holly, ivy and mistletoe hanging from the walls and ceiling and on the floor forming a kind of throne is such Xmas food as Scrooge's home had never known:
"turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, suckling-pigs, long wreathes of sausages, mince pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes and seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam".
Dickens Quotes, Food Quotes from A Christmas Carol
Following on the trail of the Spirit of Christmas Present, Scrooge feasts his eyes on the ware of the grocers' and fruiterers' shops. Dickens quotes on Xmas food at this point in A Christmas Carol are delicious:
- Chestnuts in "great round, pot-bellied baskets... shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence".
- Spanish Onions - ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed - are "shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton shyness at the girls".
- Pears and apples are "clustered high in blooming pyramids"; bunches of grapes dangle making people's mouths water.
- Hazelnuts, or filberts as Dickens calls them, are "mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shuffling ankle deep through withered leaves".
- Norfolk Biffins (a variety of apples from the English county of Norfolk) are "squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons and in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beeseching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner".
Amidst the "merry sound of scales", the rattle of canisters and the "blended scents of tea and coffee", Scrooge feasts his eyes on more luxury culinary delights:
- Raisins "so plentiful and rare";
- Almonds "so extremely white";
- Sticks of cinnamon "so long and straight";
- Candied fruits "so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious";
- Figs "moist and pulpy";
- French plums "blushed in modest tartness from their highly decorated boxes".
Dickens Quotes on Christmas Dinner
Dickens makes a lot of the Cratchits family Christmas dinner and some of his food quotes in this part of A Christmas Carol are particularly cinematic. Xmas food in the home of Scrooge's employee consisted of goose, gravy, mashed potatoes, apple sauce and pudding, apples, oranges and chestnuts.
- "There never was such a goose. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration".
- "A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house, and a pastry cook's next to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding".
- The pudding: "like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of a half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top".
And God Bless Us Every One, exclaimed Tiny Tim at the conclusion of this wondrous feast. Dickens quotes were taken from his A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843, this edition by Puffin Books, Penguin 2008. See Dickens Quotes on Xmas Food and Great Expectations Quotes for more famous sayings from the Victorian author.
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