CHRISTMAS PREP: Count the hours (& your blessings)
with recipes for lobster chowder and cheese biscuits
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It’s five days before Christmas as I’m writing this, time to start preparing for the great holiday. I know there are a few people who begin their planning in July, assembling Christmas gifts that they find perhaps at a summer vacation spot. And there are people who start to decorate their houses just as the Halloween pumpkins are dumped on the compost heap. And many more who, as soon as the dishes are cleared from the Thanksgiving table, fall into a frenzy of lists and cards and party invitations and digging out recipes and ordering a tree and wreaths and perhaps a big bird for the table and a shockingly expensive panettone and candy canes to hang with care and rum to spike the eggnog. And don’t forget the Christmas crackers, those explosive devices, one of which goes next to every plate and when exploded reveals, presto, a paper crown to wear lopsided throughout dinner. Presents for the children’s stockings, gifts to wrap and set under the tree, a treat for the dog, another for the cat, a box of chocolates for the favorite aunt, a bottle of single malt or, on second thought, maybe Canadian Club for Uncle Matt. And where did I put that copy of A Christmas Carol? Time to read it again with its chilling opening lines:
“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”
The spookiest Christmas tale ever?
Over the decades that I’ve celebrated Christmas, in many countries on many continents, I’ve learned that, even if you start to think about Christmas in July, you still end up five days before the event, with a daunting list of things left to do. And if half of those things don’t actually get done, it won’t make a bit of difference in your celebration of the day.
So, I’m down to the wire and hope to get to gift shopping tomorrow if only I can finish all the cookies and the spicy cheese biscuits before the end of today. Then it’s just assembling all the requisites for Christmas Eve (Christmas Day gets handled by other family members) and I’m off and running toward the new year.
Christmas Eve (la Vigilia, the vigil, in Italy, Noche Buena in Spain, Réveillon in France), according to ancient church dogma, marks the end of the Advent fast. I’m told the fast has not been obligatory since about the 12th century, but old habits die hard and in Catholic cultures some form of symbolic fasting (beans or fish but above all no meat) is traditional for the Night Before Christmas. As usual, we’ll have something fishy for dinner before the great feast—but something fishy in this case means lobster stew, a rich assemblage of goodness that I learned to make from Maine’s culinary eminence Sam Hayward a good many years ago.
Chef Sam is all but retired now, but still considered the dean of good food in Maine. I can attest to the fact that much of what has happened to develop good food in this northeastern outpost has been the result of his encouragement over the decades—to farmers and fishermen, to young chefs coming along, to restaurant clients and ordinary consumers. His main (Maine) effort has been to inspire us all to Pay Attention—pay attention to quality, pay attention to our relationship to the soil and the waters that surround us, pay attention to what’s happening in our gardens, on our stoves, and on our tables.
In Sam’s recipe for what he calls Scotian Lobster Chowder (the name, he says, because he learned to make it in Nova Scotia), you can see his thoughtfulness coming to play: the freshly steamed lobster, the specificity of russet potatoes, the density of the thick Jersey cream, the gentle stewing of the leeks in butter, the emphasis on shoe-peg corn.
“What exactly is shoe peg corn?” my friend Gail asked. It’s a tasty sweet corn with very small irregularly spaced kernels, a favorite in the southern states but devilishly hard to find elsewhere. (Sam’s southern grandmother may be the source of his predilection for shoe-peg corn.) I have occasionally found it frozen or canned but this time around, I had to substitute frozen white corn as the next best thing.
Scroll down to find recipes—for Sam Hayward’s Scotian Lobster Chowder and, as a lagniappe, directions for easy cheesy biscuits as made by the amazing Peg Shea, another great Maine cook, now alas no longer with us, but her cheese biscuits keep her in our hearts.
