What does a food critic cook for Christmas?

The first inquiry always comes about now, as autumn gives way to winter. “So,” the questioner asks, wet-lipped with anticipation, “what are you going to be having on the big day?” The implication is obvious. I am employed to travel the country passing judgment on restaurants both grand and less so. I look down my nose at the offerings of MasterChef contestants and then deliver a crushing verdict. Surely, therefore, Christmas lunch in my house must be magnificent; the platonic ideal of Christmas lunches to which all others must aspire, a parade of poise and ooh and ah.

I don’t blame anyone for thinking like this, because it’s what I think too. Mine really should be magnificent. It’s no accident that I’ve been a restaurant critic for two decades. I brood about what I’ll be having for dinner while eating breakfast, and daydream perfect lunch menus designed to make my guests swoon, even when I haven’t invited any. So, of course, I want my Christmas lunch to be the very best it can be. The problem is making it so.

The meal we serve on Christmas Day is unique. It is our last shared feast, a secular ritual hooked to the vestigial stump of the religious. For some it is the only time of the year when they undertake a mass cooking enterprise. While there is some flexibility – blame Charles Dickens and Prince Albert for the tropes of the modern Christmas; everything is the fault of the Victorians – we all know what it is supposed to be: a big roasted bird of some kind with that dread phrase, “all the trimmings”. Even non-meat versions keep to the script, the small print of which we feel obliged to observe or it’s not Christmas lunch.

There’s something else: it’s also an inherited meal, born of our childhoods. Some of us work furiously to recapture what it was to be cared for by our parents on Christmas Day, through the performance of cookery. Even those who escaped terrible childhoods can end up creating a Christmas lunch defined by it. In adulthood, theirs will be a so much better day than what they had to endure when young, because that is a kind of victory.

My late parents had meagre, often abusive upbringings. As adults they told me they had built their parenting around the gift of great memories: of summer holidays, birthdays and, yes, Christmas. They succeeded. My mother couldn’t stand her mother-in-law and therefore tried to hide her in a massive throng, which also enabled her to gather up any waifs and strays. There were quite a lot of gay men in our house on Christmas Day; chaps who, in the dark days of the 1970s, had been ostracised from their families because of their sexuality.

There were a significant number of actors, who couldn’t return to family in other parts of the country because they were caught between London performances on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day. There were a fair few secular Jews like us. Many of them were gay Jewish actors. One Christmas in the late 80s there were seven Jewish Equity-card-holding actors around the table, in their tissue-paper cracker hats, all of whom had auditioned for parts in the Maureen Lipman BT adverts. None of them had been successful, including my father.

Because of the numbers, which could easily top 30, it had to be turkey. Nothing else would feed that many. It was the one time of the year when the oven timer would come into use. We would awake on Christmas morning sniffing the air to check it had kicked in. Yes, there were bacon rolls and sausages. There were roast potatoes and bread sauce, but the red cabbage was after an old Ashkenazi Jewish recipe and there would always be chopped liver as a canape, which was so good it would blunt the appetite. It was a kind of Jewish Christmas and one year, literally so. Claire’s brother’s family were in town for the festivities, which meant her aunt and uncle, who kept kosher, also came. Out of respect she ordered a kosher turkey, but it arrived pre-stuffed with sausage meat. She was possibly the only person in Britain that year who spent Christmas Eve unstuffing the turkey. I’m not sure the rabbi would have approved.

Eventually, in my late 20s when my mother had finally had enough, the baton passed. It was time for me to cook for them at my house. That Christmas lunch was merely an act of imitation, an attempt to get the same complex meal on to a different table. I quickly worked out it was down to the planning. It was, and remains, the only day of the year when I write a timetable. I start with “2pm – serve” at the bottom and work backwards up the sheet of paper until I get to something like “9am – oven on”. Over the years, everything in between has changed.

At first, I did the chopped liver, but soon clocked that with that on offer, nobody would have room for anything else. One year, because it had been all the rage in the fancy London restaurants I was by then reviewing, it was a pumpkin soup with a ballast of cream and truffle oil, foamed up courtesy of a hand cappuccino beater. Everyone was baffled, but polite. The next year I did something involving king prawns and chilli, because I thought it made me seem cosmopolitan and vibrant.

Eventually I reached a conclusion: the solution to the Christmas Day starter was shopping. For a while this was smoked salmon, the good stuff with a little tension and bite: a supply of capers, lemon, black pepper and the right sort of crackers, and away we went. It looked classy. It was performative. It bellowed Christmas. There was only one problem. It turned out, inexplicably, that not everyone liked smoked salmon.

I went shopping in another direction. Now, each year, the table is laid with platters of Spanish charcuterie, of jamon Iberico the colour of plum velvet plush, and rust-coloured chorizo and perhaps a little salami studded with fennel seeds. This, of course, is a function of availability. It was only about a decade ago that it became possible to get all this without hassle. Starter, sorted.

Which brings me to the main event. Over the years I have circulated through all the bird options. At first there was turkey. Then there was a three-bird roast: a goose, stuffed with a chicken, stuffed with a pheasant. I liked it because it cooked quickly and carved like a loaf of bread, but in truth that destroyed a lot of the ceremony. Then one year I watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall stuff a goose neck on TV, while talking about respecting the bird. I thought: “Be more like Hugh. Have goose.” But it turned out life is too short to stuff a goose neck and it’s not very respectful anyway. Plus, cooking goose made my kitchen greasy for three months, and the volume of meat was meagre. I went back to turkey and learned not to cook it for nine hours, like it was a baby camel. It’s just a big chicken. Turkey, it shall now remain.

The real breakthrough was realising that I didn’t need to be like my mother and cater as if this might be our last meal because a pogrom was coming. There did not have to be sprouts and green beans and cabbage, both red and green, and roast parsnips and roast potatoes. Some things are non-negotiable. There must be bread sauce. I like the job of studding the onion with the cloves. There must be bacon rolls. But it turns out you can do just the one vegetable alongside the potatoes because – a revelation, this – no one will complain. What’s more, if you edit the Christmas lunch in this manner, you can serve it more quickly. There’s a chance everyone might still be eating by the time you’ve finally plated up for yourself.

Which leaves dessert. Here is what 25 years of cooking Christmas lunches has taught me: nobody actually likes Christmas pudding apart from Richard E Grant, who hoards them and eats one a week throughout the year. And the other person who just read that sentence and immediately emailed me to complain. Obviously, setting fire to something is important. My advice: get a small one, flame it in brandy, then leave it for the next day to be fried in butter or, better still, bacon fat. It’s what the baby Jesus would have wanted.

There is only one thing people really want at the end of Christmas lunch: jelly. And it has to be Rowntree’s, possibly raspberry, definitely lime. And pouring cream. If that doesn’t feel showy enough, do something with meringue. Or combine all three: meringue, piled with whipped cream and lime jelly is the spirit of Christmas.

You know this all makes sense. I once argued that the problem with dinner parties is too much cooking. The less you do the better. I now feel the same about Christmas lunch. For so many years it felt like I had something to prove, not just to others but to myself. Given my job, it had to be a belter. But now I realise it doesn’t have to be that way. It just needs to be a nice meal with people you love or, at the very least, know. And if it isn’t a huge success, well, don’t worry. There’s always next year.