Keeping bad news off the dinner table this Christmas (a view from Spain)

With the run-in to Christmas about to accelerate, you may already be preparing some interesting facts or conversation starters to impress your family, your partner or the in-laws. With the disruption of 2020 Christmas, there will be even more pressure to be on the top of your game.

This Christmas, the battle will be to keep bad news off the table.

The topic “no-go area list” will be longer than the most expectant child′s Santa list – inflation, shortages of all kinds, vaccines, PCR tests and travel, Afghanistan, politics in general….the problem is that bad news is all we′ve all been speaking about wherever we live, means that extra effort will be needed to initiate positive dialogue.

Indeed if you get caught in the “no-go list trap” you may even cause offence to, or be offended by, an in-law not on the same wavelength as you and the rest of Christmas could get very awkward. “I don′t know what she ever saw in him”

With an “off the table” strategy, the challenge will be to have any conversation at all without the threat of disappearing down the tunnel of misery.

Since I moved to Spain in 2019, I was struck immediately by how conversation generally began with food. Even this weekend, the first question someone asked me after meeting him was "what is the UK equivalent of a guiso?" (basically like a stew but made on the stove typically combining sautéed meat with potato or pulses and a sauce – very simple). I gave the Lancashire Hot Pot and one pot cooking in general the big build up.

Unfortunately Jamie Oliver gave all British food a bad name with his school meals campaign which everyone here remembers and is (to my horror) even included in my children′s English text books, so everyone assumes we eat the equivalent of the school dinners he lambasted 16 years ago, or thinks Leicester Square is the hub of UK gastronomy so I constantly find myself defending “our” food.

The Spanish take a bit of a back step when I explain bacon, sausages, puddings and beer are better back home. They beat us on lots of other things though. You can eat out well and for less here and giving the Murcians their due, the local produce, fish and modern small plate cooking is pretty darn good, and the variety of different cured Ibérico and Serrano hams isn′t bad either. Ice cold Estrella de Levante is preferable than ale on a sweltering hot day.

Talking food and drink comes naturally to the locals. Murcia, although a fairly large city, sits in the garden of Europe and most families have access to a huerta (allotment) full of citrus and fruit trees, and food is fully embedded into daily culture with never ending lunches at the weekend.

Comparing tomato varieties, the best way to eat artichoke or arguing how good or bad the local Monastrell grape is – in my opinion there is some seriously good wine here - is far more pleasurable to talk about than the unmentionables.

That said I should say I also get Brexit overload here too from the Spanish perspective - not sympathetic in the slightest with radio stations taking glee in the current supply issues. However, it′s good to see they′ve sorted out an emergency freight train system set up from here to take fresh food straight to Barking station in London to help out with driver shortages. Article here

Christmas Eve is as important if not more so than Christmas Day with tardeo (essentially extended aperitive in the afternoon – outdoor terraces are open all year round) with friends followed by a big meal in the evening with family. ???????????????

Santa isn′t quite as generous here as the children anticipate more expectantly “Los Reyes Magos” (Three Kings) who leave presents on top of your slippers when you wake up on 6th January, before visiting extended family to see if they have left presents for you there too, so the last minute wrapping doesn′t really exist – indeed the shops wrap for you – most children think the Kings buy from El Corte Inglés.

In south eastern Spain, the conversation at the table this Christmas shouldn′t be too much of a challenge and food and drink generally becomes the default.

The Spanish like to talk (a lot) and over each other. Don′t interrupt or you don′t speak and if you speak too slowly or don′t get to the point, expect to be interrupted or for someone else to finish what you are saying (and generally not saying what you intended to say, and then there is no way of correcting them). I am generally in this camp and have come to accept it.

This Christmas will be my third outside the UK and all my family are coming here with the guarantee that there should be sufficient food as well as spending it with the grandchildren.

Without parodying Christmas Day and the typical family get together too much, lunch could possibly follow a similar course in many households in the UK.

There will be an obligatory praise for the cook(s) even if they are last to sit down and still bringing food out as others have started “before it gets cold”. That is a given every year.

Once this is done, cook(s) have sat down, and assuming turkey makes its way to the table, this year be prepared for the family member who will bring up the fact of how lucky you are to be eating the bird, accompanied by a tale of how they know someone or of someone who bought their frozen turkey in Iceland in August, if it isn′t actually the turkey you are eating.

At this point there should be a red light alert - conversation needs moving on before you move on to drivers, petrol, inflation and back to Brexit and potentially Covid and there will be no way of recovering the situation and you will be talking May, Cameron, Cummings, Barnard Castle, Macron, the French, “Trump being right all along”, before you know it.

At this stage you will need a game changing conversation starter but keeping on the food theme.

From nowhere why not ask the table why the cooked ham and bacon are likely to have a pink colour?

Someone will or should know that it′s to do with the sodium nitrite used in the preservation process. You will already know, and congratulate that intelligent family member and build on the answer by elaborating on the fact that it is a result of the chemical reactions between sodium nitrite and myoglobin that begins at the curing process where fresh meat is infused with a sodium nitrite solution and is quickly converted to nitric oxide (NO). Nitric oxide binds to myoglobin and changes fresh meat colour to a bright red known as nitroslymyoglobin.

Having impressed the table with your knowledge despite your lack of microbiology or chemistry doctorate, you should have stopped bad news in its tracks.

At Christmas we are allowed to indulge and opening up a conversation around health should be saved for the new year and at this stage you should not bring out the World Health Organization research into the relationship of nitrites in food production on health. I will leave you to google. If someone raises this, you should move them on immediately to talk about it another time. Afterall, it′s Christmas.

You have probably realised at this stage I have wriggled in a bit of what I do, workwise - this is a professional networking site.

I am fortunate to work with a team of ground-breaking scientists at Prosur (or as one newspaper called them ′boffins′) and they have developed an alternative to curing with sodium nitrite but through the antioxidant capacity provided by polyphenols (found in plants) which prevents the meat from turning brown and keeping its natural colour.

If you choose nitrite-free bacon or ham this Christmas, and it is still a pink/reddish colour, it will have been made this way.

Why not have a pack up your sleeve (or better hidden in the fridge), volunteer to make breakfast on Boxing Day (which incidentally doesn′t exist in Spain), and keep the food conversation going and the dark clouds at bay. Better still maybe the cook has already used it and you can praise him or her even more.

For the actual food technologists, scientists, technicians, developers and academics, click on the link to read this study article published in Foods: “Toward Nitrite-Free Curing” https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/10/2/313/htm

Happy Christmas preparations everyone.

?Buena suerte!

Subnote:

My children hold both British and Spanish passports and for any element of doubt, not captured in this article, am equally fond of both countries and cultures. I am fortunate to have been able to have enjoyed and continue enjoying the best of both.