"christmas food history" news and stories

Summarizing what Christmas celebrants used to serve at their festive dinners is no simpler than listing what eaters today consider requisite holiday foods: For various families on a single city block, it might not feel like Christmas without getting drunk on eggnog; slicing up a pannetone; gorging on baccala; tucking into a roasted goose; slurping down glogg or munching on stollen.

Americans' conception of Christmas dinner has always turned on such inalienable attributes as ethnic heritage and birthplace: A first-generation Vietnamese-American living in Louisiana probably doesn't set the same Christmas table as a fourth-generation Swedish-American with a home in northern Minnesota.

Still, it's possible to get some sense of what early Americans deemed standard Christmas fare by examining what they served their society's least fortunate members. Holiday menus from prisons provide a pretty good guide to which foods Americans thought of as so indispensable that even robbers, counterfeiters and killers deserved to enjoy them come Dec. 25.