Who better to sample sackfuls of festive-season sandwiches than our own Jay Rayner?
What exactly does the baby Jesus taste like? Or to put it in a rather more obliging manner, how would you describe the flavour of Christmas? Because a defined flavour it must now have. In recent years, for example, a high-street coffee-shop chain (once famous for avoiding tax and therefore doesn’t get a name check), has launched a website specifically to count down to the launch of its Christmas offerings: cue outbreaks of desiccated cinnamon, stale gingerbread and eggnog with the consistency of late winter snot. You fancy a bit of that cosy Danish hygge you’ve heard so much about? You want a multinational corporation to give you a cuddle? Well, get out your wallet, because nothing says Christmas more than a toffee nut latte.
This isn’t actually unreasonable. There is no greater route to memory than through taste and smell. With each spiced waft we are attempting to access a lost feeling: that of being a kid, when Christmas still meant something. And so to the increasingly omnipresent Christmas sandwich, without which no high-street food operation would be complete. You know what we’re talking about: some combination of turkey, stuffing, a sweet jellied sauce claiming to be cranberry, maybe some bacon, perhaps some greens, all slammed between granary bread with the texture of Grandma’s eiderdown.
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