I’m reading the first Harry Potter to my SO and we have some culinary questions. Hogwarts’s Christmas dinner includes chipolatas and Christmas cake.
I know chipolatas are some kind of sausage, but would someone please describe them further?
Does “Christmas cake” refer to a particular sort of cake, or is it being used here to mean some generic cake that is being served on Christmas.
Thanks.
I am going by my Mum’s Christmas.
Chipolatas are small (10cm) somewhat spicy sausages. Small, porky, garlicy, vaguely Mexican. They go very well with turkey.
Christmas cake is a rich fruit cake, often soaked with alcohol, topped with marzipan and a thin layer of icing.
Our chipolatas are just baby sausages, they don’t taste a whole lot different from normal sausages.
As hawthorne said, christmas cake is a really dense, rich fruitcake. Mum marinates the fruit in rum for a week before she makes it. The icing on top is usually white.
Aye, same here (UK). Chipolatas are basically very small sausages that go into the oven wrapped in bacon to cook alongside the turkey. You have one or two of them each. They do come in different sizes – to my mind a “normal” chipolata is only about 3-4cm, but the ones that I just got from the supermarket were pretty much normal-sized sausages.
Christmas cake is really, really dense, and usually soaked in alcohol. I’m not a huge fan, except for the icing my grandma makes, which is pretty much half-an-inch of marzipan and half-an-inch of icing (well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration).