What December Actually Tastes Like

The first Christmas I spent in England, somebody asked me if I missed the snow. I had never seen snow. What I missed was the noise.

Christmas in Guadeloupe does not arrive on the 25th. It arrives at the end of November, in somebody’s yard, with thirty people and a songbook.

Chanté Nwèl: the singing starts first

From late November until Christmas Eve, families across Guadeloupe and Martinique take turns hosting a chanté Nwèl. Someone puts the word out, and by evening there are people in the yard, chairs borrowed from three houses, and a stack of thin paper songbooks that get passed around and fall apart a little more every year.

You sing cantiques, the old French carols, but not the way they are sung in a church in France. They are sung over drums, over a chacha, over whatever is in the house, and they get faster as the evening goes on. Nobody is performing. Everybody is loud.

And the whole time, people are eating.

That is the part I want to explain to anyone in Britain who thinks of a Caribbean Christmas as a beach with tinsel on it. The season is not one dinner. It is five or six weeks of other people’s kitchens.

What is actually on the table

Ham. If there is one thing that says Christmas in the French Antilles, it is the ham. A big one, scored and glazed, usually with pineapple in the picture somewhere, brought out whole so that everyone can see it before it is carved. It is the centre of the table the way a turkey is in England, and to my taste it is a better idea, because it is just as good cold on the 27th.

Pois d’Angole. Pigeon peas, cooked with rice. Green ones if you can get them fresh at the market in December, which you can, because that is when they come. This is the dish that tells you it is Christmas and not any other Sunday.

Boudin créole. Our blood sausage, spiced hot, served in short lengths as something to eat standing up with a drink in the other hand. At a chanté Nwèl there is always boudin, and there is never enough.

Ignames, patates douces, fruit à pain. Yam, sweet potato, breadfruit. The root vegetables that have fed the islands since long before anyone was writing recipes down.

And chilli, somewhere. There is always a sauce on the table for the people who want it, and always somebody who does not.

What people drink

Shrubb. This is the one I would put in a British Christmas tomorrow if I could.

Shrubb is rum, left to sit with dried orange peel and spice until it goes dark and sweet and tastes of the season. Families start it weeks in advance, which is its own kind of advent calendar, and every house claims a slightly different method. It comes out at Christmas and it is gone by January.

The anglophone islands have sorrel, the deep red drink made from dried hibiscus, which is its own tradition and worth a piece of its own. We drink that too. But if you handed a Guadeloupean a glass at Christmas, they would be expecting shrubb.

Why it is not the Christmas Britain knows

Britain built its Caribbean Christmas from the islands that came here: Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Guyana. That is why a British Caribbean Christmas means sorrel, black cake, curry goat and rice and peas, and it is a beautiful table.

The French islands mostly went to mainland France instead. So the ham, the pois d’Angole, the boudin, the chanté Nwèl and the shrubb never made the crossing to Britain in any number. There is no Guadeloupean bakery in Milton Keynes selling you a slice of Christmas.

That is not a complaint. It is just the reason most people here have never tasted any of it.

Bringing a piece of it to an English Christmas

You do not need to cook a whole Antillean Christmas to borrow from it. Two things travel well.

The first is the ham. A British gammon is already close to what we do, and it takes a Caribbean glaze better than almost anything else on the Christmas table. Mine is here: Caribbean glazed ham, built on the Exotic Caribbean Sauce, which brings the passion fruit and the sweetness that a pineapple glaze is reaching for.

The second is having something on the table with heat in it, so that the people who want fire can have it and nobody else has to. A small dish of Caribbean Hot Sauce does that job on the 25th just as well as it does in July.

And if you want to feed people through the whole season the way we do, the pot that does it is a Caribbean pumpkin soup or a chicken colombo. Both get better the next day, which is the only thing you actually need from December cooking.

One more thing

The real lesson of a Guadeloupean Christmas is not any single dish. It is that the season is long, it is loud, and it is spent in other people’s houses. The food exists to keep people in the yard for another hour.

If you take one thing from our December, take that.

Joyeux Nwèl.

JP