Virgil Evetts is a New Zealand food writer with a refreshing twist on words about what we eat. Here is his latest musings on eating healthily over the festive season. We think you will love this quick read…
“I write this in reaction to the sheer misery of healthy food suggestions for the festive season, offered up lately by so many monastic do-gooders. If ever there was a time when such sentiment was less welcome … My advice, nay commandment, for ‘this most wonderful time of year’, is to eat very badly indeed.
Most importantly over coming days, we should all consume and advocate the consumption of a great deal of fat. Saturated fat, too, of the most drenched and sodden kind. Not rice bran oil. Please, God, never rice bran oil.
Anybody who tells you that a joyful low-fat Christmas spread is possible is lying. Anybody who claims to actually enjoy the likes of chaste, trim trifles and other dour offerings is a deluded nuisance and should be subdued promptly and if it pleases you, brutally. It’s your duty as protectors of the sacred flame of pleasurable eating.
Here are a few of my favourite fats for the festive season. If I’m honest (which is a topic open for discussion) they are my favourite fats year-round. But in the interests of making it through to a pensionable age (which for my generation will likely be around 80), I try to hold back a bit until December. Mostly.
And so, butter. You know what you’re getting with butter. It comes from cows, it tastes better than just about anything and more so in New Zealand where we have the best butter in the world. I don’t say this with any sense of patriotism. In many regards New Zealand is utter pants but our butter, made from the cream of year-round pasture-fed herds, is extraordinary. And now, thanks to the great efforts of Lewis Road Creamery, our butter has truly arrived as a legitimate artisan product. Hallelujah!
Over Christmas I go through great tombstones of butter. It goes into my stollen, panetonne, pandoro, paté, potted prawns, pastry and brandy butter. Cognac and Calvados butter too, if I’m feeling especially deserving.
Given the quality and sheer exuberance of our butter (and dairy in general) we are honour and duty-bound as an industry to pour every drop of scorn at our disposal onto a certain dairy behemoth’s aspirations to move dairy farming indoors. In my opinion it’s reprehensible in terms of animal welfare, beyond stupid in terms of brand management. This is what happens when you let cowpokes run half the economy …
Now for cream. Mostly I just want to talk up the joys of Lewis Road Creamery’s extraordinary Jersey Cow cream and double cream. No person in possession of taste buds needs telling that cream is grand, but this stuff is something else. Regal. Nice to have access to real double cream, too, particularly if you dip into many British cook books. I always splash cream about freely over the Christmas season. This year I plan to drink it neat. Lewis Road could do worse than sell seasonal six packs.
As for lardo, OK, this stuff is no good for cooking and most people seem to shudder at the very thought, but for me it’s the ultimate Christmas treat. Lardo, if you don’t already know, is salted, pressed and air-dried pork fat, essentially prosciutto cruda without the meat. Sliced paper thin, it melts on the tongue like some satanic communion wafer, releasing beautiful, lyrical notes of dry summer meadows, of hazelnuts and subtle spicing. Lardo is truly the fat lovers’ fat. Seek it here, seek it there, then eat the whole bloody lot.
Wishing you all a fatty, fabulous, joyful and, of course, safe Christmas. Salut!”
Virgil Evetts
New Zealand Guild Of Food Writers
To keep up with eating badly, as well as Virgil’s adventures in NZ food, gardening and urban farming, like his Facebook page here.