Damn, everything in this thread sounds great. Even the takeout
I also do turkey for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Ham is for New Year’s Day.
That’s what I had for dinner tonight, first night of Hanukkah, made with potatoes leftover from our US Thanksgiving 3 days ago. They were delicious~I’ve resolved to make too many potatoes every year!
Interesting to see the amount of people that cite ‘ham’ as the go-to roast for Easter - in Europe (most places) it’s lamb - lamb of god/shepherd of men etc plus spring lamb is bang in season.
In the UK, ham tends be a roast you cook for cold cuts to eat during Christmas week, or for New Year’s Day.
I’ve cooked both ham and lamb for Easter, but I prefer lamb. Right off the top of my head, I can’t think of another special occasion devoted to ham unless it’s St Patrick’s Day. I was surprised to learn that corned beef and cabbage is not a traditional Irish dish. It was apparently adopted by Irish immigrants in the US, where beef was plentiful. Ham and pork were the meats they mostly ate in their homeland.
My dad (a first-generation Hungarian-American) made a good spaghetti sauce with lots of ground beef, peppers, and mushrooms. That was his Christmas dinner the last few years of his life. The only other thing I ever saw him cook for Christmas and New Year was roast chicken seasoned with paprika and stuffed with rice.
Another thing I did when my daughter was growing up was bake over Christmas and New Year. I made big batches of chocolate- and butterscotch-chip cookies and brought them to her and her friend next door while they played in the hallway of our building.
I also baked pound cake from scratch, most of which went into English trifles with layers of jam, and trays full of Scottish shortbread. I even learned to make custard and pumpkin pies from scratch.
Beignets were year-round, and summers were for fruit pies and cobblers.
Again, I don’t do this anymore because it’s too labor-intensive and I can no longer stand for hours in the kitchen. Besides, it’s just no fun once you’re on your own.
Christmas was the time to make the “old-country” foods that took too much time or had too expensive (imported) ingredients for everyday food. Since the family had members from several countries we had quite a variety at the get-togethers. And the DESSERTS…
Cookies: For a while we had the tradition of making rum balls on the day after Thanksgiving - and they had to mature for a month. So they came out for Christmas. (Rum balls made with crumbled Nilla (r) wafers.) Another cookie was Pizzeles made with anise. Every family in the clan got a big coffee can full as a gift.
One thing we always had at the Christmas party was three-layer gelatin dessert, made in a cookie sheet. Translucent lime on the bottom, opaque off-white in the center (lemon with sour cream mixed in?), and translucent cherry on the top. Cut into squares and serve.
We do turkey for both T’giving and Xmas. We’ve been known to cook turkey at random days in the year, just because.
Since I was born and way before (I’ve seen pictures!), Christmas has always been ham and spaghetti and meatballs. Sides are cheesy potatoes, buns, and salad. Dessert is Christmas cookies and a birthday cake for baby Jesus that the little kids decorate. My grandma would always make 2 amazingly delicious chocolate cream pies topped with meringue. I haven’t had one since she died. Every year I tell myself that I’m going to give it a shot and try making one. Maybe this year.
In fact, when my grandma was alive spaghetti and meatballs were also served on Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day. We still do Easter. The others are the regular cookout foods nowadays.
When I was a kid, we had a big extended family dinner on New Year’s Day (the same people we just saw a week ago at Christmas). My mom got stuck with that meal. How she hated it. She was usually up late the night before and now had to entertain a houseful of people. She would always do a pork roast and a beef roast with potatoes and carrots. Now everyone stays home. At my house, we usually get pizza.
It is perhaps notable that when Scrooge wakes up on Christmas day, now a changed man thanks to the ghosts, he sends Bob Cratchit’s family a turkey to show his generosity.
In my family (UK) there’s no Thanksgiving dinner to worry about, but none of us are that keen on turkey anyway, so for Christmas it’s almost always been roast beef (with all the trimmings). But last year we were all in our own homes for obvious reasons, and I was lucky enough to find a semi-prepared piece of venison with wine and juniper gravy in the supermarket.
I still had Yorkshire puddings and horseradish sauce with it, though.
It’s not nearly as common here in the U.S. in general anymore, likely for some of the same reasons that goose isn’t – it doesn’t lend itself as well to large-scale farming operations.
This article from Epicurious, from a few years ago, indicated that about half of Americans have never eaten lamb, and that the average consumption of lamb among Americans is only about a pound a year. It also notes that lamb production in the U.S. peaked in the 1940s.
In my family it was just Thanksgiving 2.0. Pretty much exactly.
Thanksgiving 2.0 about sums it up as a kid. For the last 20 years or so it has been “whatever we feel like at whatever restaurant in Vegas we’re eating at.”
Yep. Turkey is #1 , followed by prime rib, but we do Prime rib for New years day.
Once in a great while we do a ham, since that means many days of good luchmeat.
Although we like roast beef at Christmas, as I mentioned upthread, there’s another tradition that we sometimes follow. It started in the early 2000s with the Lord of the Rings movies, which we’d watch in the theater on Christmas morning. Afterwards we’d go to a big nearby dim sum restaurant and feast on dumplings.
There are no more Lord of the Rings movies, nor anything to take their place really, but we can always do dim sum on Christmas day, movie or no.
It’s that lamb isn’t factory farmed. So it costs a lot more than most meats in the US, so kids don’t grow up eating it. And it has a distinctive enough flavor to turn off people who are expecting it to taste like beef, i expect.
I love lamb, though, and eat it somewhat often.
Christmas Ham
It’s been a tradition in my family long before my birth.
I agree, both the cost and the flavor are big issues for the average American. Especially in the era of super lean beef and pork, as well as boneless skinless chicken being the default iteration of chicken, there are a lot of people who are turned away by a strong ‘meat’ flavor, which lamb certainly is.
Combine that with it being a bit tricky to cook (medium rare lamb is a divine dish, but anything over the most mild medium tends to be garbage) - and you find a lot of people who didn’t grow up eating it won’t even attempt it more than once.
My father had relatively few dishes he was good at, but about 3 times a year (often for Passover) he’d cook a whole, bone in leg of lamb - complete with incisions to insert whole gloves of garlic and springs of rosemary. It was always cooked medium rare, and was one of my favorites. Still, the price and difficulty carving (dull knives, bane of many a roast) made it a once-in-a-great-while food.
Myself, I’ve tried cooking a boneless leg of lamb myself, and while it was . . . fine? I couldn’t spend the time and money dialing it in when there are plenty of other tasty meat creatures that aren’t nearly as finicky or expensive (duck breast, duck breast, and oh yeah, duck breast). Combine that with my wife not eating meat, and it just doesn’t show up as one of my dishes.
I’ve never seen lamb in the regular supermarkets. Even at a butcher it’s not all that common. The only places I see it regularly are Middle Eastern and Greek restaurants.