Holidays are now the only time of year when we really focus on what and how we eat—and that is a source of security

With each passing year, holiday food seems to become more intensely ritualized.

With each passing year, holiday food seems to become more intensely ritualized. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

By Bee Wilson

Nov. 22, 2017 11:00 a.m. ET

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The other day I saw someone in a cafe drinking both Coca-Cola and coffee, taking alternate sips of each, and I thought, “Huh, are we doing that now?” Almost nothing surprises me anymore when it comes to people breaking food rules, because it feels as if there are almost no remaining rules to break. I’ve seen people order a salad and a slice of chocolate cake and eat the cake first. I’ve seen people eat french fries for dessert and dinner for breakfast, and no one blinks. Eating three structured meals a day, seated at a table, is almost a thing of the past.

There’s still one great exception to this dining anarchy: holiday meals. When we sit down for a big seasonal dinner, we become a completely different kind of eater, with fierce and dogmatic views about what should be served and when.

For six years straight, my family went to the same friends’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. As soon as there was a chill in the air, I started to look forward to that meal, because the components were regular as clockwork. There was always a perfectly roasted turkey, carved away from the table, with the light meat and the dark meat laid out separately on a large platter inherited from our host’s mother. There were smooth, buttery mashed potatoes and an incredibly savory turkey gravy. To go with the turkey, our friends served a raw cranberry and nut relish, a family recipe, which tasted brighter and fresher than any traditional cooked cranberry sauce. These dinners took place in Britain, though the hosts were American, and to me and the other British guests it felt like an education in the rules of Thanksgiving.

Canned cranberry sauce is a staple on many Thanksgiving tables.

Canned cranberry sauce is a staple on many Thanksgiving tables. PHOTO: ISTOCK

On the sixth year, an interloper appeared on the dinner table. In addition to the usual raw cranberry relish, there was an inverted can of jellied cranberry sauce, incongruously sitting on a fancy china plate. The jellied cylinder glowed an aggressive red in the soft candlelight. This was the kind of cranberry sauce so solid that it would bounce off the floor if dropped, so gelatinous that a 1950s homemaker might call it a “salad.” Over the course of the dinner, almost no one ate any of this dull, wobbly condiment. It had been provided at the request of a new set of American guests for whom it couldn’t really be Thanksgiving without canned cranberry sauce.

Our hosts were both anthropologists, and they understood why someone might have an irrational need to honor a seemingly pointless food tradition. “Ritual matters,” one of them remarked with a smile, clearing away the remains of the unappetizing red cylinder.

‘The rest of our eating is now so divested of ritual.’

With each passing year, holiday food seems to become more intensely ritualized. The repertoire may have widened over the past decade to take in new items such as “festive” kale salad and quinoa and pomegranate stuffing, but our fierce attachment to the cooking itself hasn’t changed. Whether it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, Rosh Hashana or Diwali, the list-making starts ever earlier. I have a friend who starts anticipating the candied walnuts she makes every Christmas as early as September. The recipe columns advise that we treat holiday preparation like a “battle plan” and provide lists of cooking instructions for the big day, mapped out minute by minute, starting at some ungodly hour with, “Get up. Switch on oven. Have coffee.”

Perhaps our excitement about holiday meals has increased precisely because the rest of our eating is now so divested of ritual (except, perhaps, for our morning coffee). For most of us, holiday eating is less about religion and more about food. It’s about treating dinner like it is the most important thing in the world.

Take Passover. Pew Research found that in 2013, 70% of all Jews in the U.S., including 42% of self-identified “secular” Jews, participated in the Seder meal that starts the holiday. It was far more widely observed than Yom Kippur, the culmination of the High Holy Days. The difference is that Yom Kippur is a solemn fast, whereas Passover is a feast, full of food-related ritual—something easy to buy into, no matter what your beliefs.

Traditional foods on a Seder plate for the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Traditional foods on a Seder plate for the Jewish holiday of Passover. PHOTO: ISTOCK

The food writer Nigella Lawson wrote in her 2004 book “Feast” about how she came to adopt the Seder meal, despite not having grown up with it in her own nonobservant Jewish family. Ms. Lawson now relishes the chance to have friends over for roast lamb, matzo, bitter herbs and haroset, the sweet mixture of fruits and nuts that symbolize the mortar used by the Israelites enslaved in Egypt. “What turned me around was the cooking,” she writes.

In our daily meals, we have become starved of ritual, which can make it feel as if life has lost its rhythms. Holidays are the only time of the year when we know what we are meant to be eating, collectively, and in these uncertain times, this bestows a wonderful feeling of security.

In years gone by, the holiday meals of winter were just one feast among many. The whole year was punctuated with moments of sweetness and celebration. There were harvest feasts and midsummer feasts, pig-killing feasts and saint’s days. Throughout Europe, people used to eat delicious fried foods for the Carnival that came before Lent. Each region of France had its own version of a beignet—a puffed-up, deep-fried delicacy sweetened with sugar or honey. Imagine how ambrosial such a fried treat must have tasted when you ate it only once a year. It isn’t quite the same when you can buy a Dunkin’ Donut any day of the week, any time of day. Without the fast, it is less of a feast.

‘Holiday meals carry the weight of all the years that came before.’

One modern innovation that has killed off our seasonal rituals is the globalized food supply, which blurs the keen awareness that cooks once had about certain foods belonging to particular months. It is a luxury to have year-round access to summer berries and winter greens, but this ubiquity also dulls the magic of anticipation. In India, carrot halwa is a dessert made from grated carrots, raisins, evaporated milk, cardamom and sugar. It used to mark the end of summer and the start of autumn, because that was the only time of year when carrots were plentiful. But now, as chef Vivek Singh explains in his book “Indian Festival Feasts,” you can easily find carrots in supermarkets year-round and cooks make carrot halwa any time they feel like it.

No wonder we go over-the-top with our holiday meals. It is the one time of year when the old rituals still seem to mean something, carrying the weight of all the years that came before. I have been cooking a near-identical Christmas dinner for 18 years now, since my oldest child was born (although I’ve gone back and forth on the merits and drawbacks of orange zest in the cranberry sauce). This year, the rituals feel more urgent than ever before because my son will be returning home for a week during a year of study in China. This meal is my chance to remind him of the structures of home before he flies back to another continent.

Dishes for the Indian festival of Diwali.

Dishes for the Indian festival of Diwali. PHOTO: ISTOCK

After the spicy noodles of Nanjing, I suspect that my British seasonings will taste bland on Dec. 25, but I wouldn’t dream of cooking anything else. I will make the same old nutmeg-scented bread sauce (made from milk, onion and breadcrumbs) to go with the turkey, the same polenta-crusted roast potatoes, the same tiny sausages, the same Brussels sprouts (each one trimmed and scored with a cross before they are steamed), the same currant-and-almond-studded Christmas pudding and brandy butter. The brandy butter—made of sugar, butter and cognac and whipped to a buttercream texture—is our family’s equivalent of canned cranberry sauce. No one eats much of this heady alcoholic concoction except for my father-in-law, but not to have it on the table would be anathema. It wouldn’t be Christmas without brandy butter.

Food ritual used to be woven into the fabric of the day and the week. Across the Christian world, Catholics abstained from eating meat on Fridays to mark the day of the week when Jesus died—so it couldn’t be a Friday without fish. Other days, too, had their own special meals, which varied from country to country. In Britain, Sundays called for roast meat with all the trimmings (pork and apple sauce, lamb with mint sauce, beef with horseradish). Monday dinner would be rissoles, a sort of dried-out hamburger made from minced cooked meat, or shepherd’s pie, a ragout of shredded meat topped with mashed potatoes, to use up the leftovers.

There are still some vestiges of this rhythmical way of eating in Catholic countries. At trattorias in Rome, the daily specials are comfortingly predictable, as food writer Rachel Roddy explains. “Friday is the day for pasta and chickpeas or salt cod” she wrote last year in the Guardian, “Saturday for Roman-style tripe with mint and pecorino, Sunday for fettuccine with chicken livers and then roast lamb, Monday for rice and endive in broth, Tuesday for pasta and beans, Wednesday for whatever you fancy, and Thursday for gnocchi.”

This business of gnocchi on Thursdays is a ritual in Argentina too, as my brother-in-law Gonzalo, who grew up in Buenos Aires, often remarks. Gonzalo remembers that when he was growing up, Thursday was the day before people got paid, so you ate gnocchi, which was about the cheapest meal a cook could summon up, consisting of little more than potatoes, flour and salt. Under the gnocchi plate, you put a coin, to bring good luck.

Gnocchi on Thursdays is a ritual in countries like Argentina.

Gnocchi on Thursdays is a ritual in countries like Argentina. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Holiday food is about reclaiming some of these lost rhythms—of the seasons, of meals and of family life. Yes, it can also mean reviving the not-so-good traditions of squabbling at the dinner table, of bruised egos and of bossy cooks who force people to take unwanted second helpings. But at least we manage to pull our gaze away from flashing screens and really eat together, for once.

Human appetites are sociable, and we deprive ourselves of half the value of food when we always eat alone. For some families, in a normal workweek, it has become almost impossible to coordinate mealtimes, let alone to gather everyone around a table.

In 2009-10, a team of researchers from University College London’s Institute of Education set out to study how the pressures of time affected the eating habits of 40 dual-earner households. (Their findings were published in 2013 in the journal Community, Work and Family.) Between the pressures of work and after-school activities, fewer than a third of the families managed to eat dinner together on “most weekdays.” In one family of five, the mother and the father were on two separate weight-loss diets, and the youngest daughter was a picky eater who wouldn’t touch any of the foods on either parent’s diet. The mother commented that the only time everyone ate the same thing at the same time was on Christmas day.

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I recently interviewed a European director of Hello Fresh, one in a growing industry of meal-kit companies that supply recipe cards and pre-measured ingredients to time-pressed households. He said that according to their market research, when it came to the amount of time customers wanted to spend on cooking a meal, most had a “sweet spot” of no more than 27 minutes—and preferably less. Only at holiday time do we switch back to being cooks ruled by flavor, not by time.

Cooking for Thanksgiving or Christmas, we can revert to being less frazzled by time or trends. We stop fretting about carb content and worry instead about whether there is enough heavy cream in the scalloped potatoes. The single-person serving is swapped for the common pot. Time in the kitchen becomes slow and luxuriant. Instead of googling “three-ingredient recipes” or “quick and easy midweek dinners,” we start to think that eight hours is really no time at all to spend on getting dinner ready.

The refrain of the food industry is “the consumer wants choice,” but our annual excitement about holiday food suggests that we feel liberated by not having to choose, for once. Ritual can set you free.

There are an average 38,900 items for sale in U.S. supermarkets, according to the Food Marketing Institute, but when cooking Thanksgiving dinner, you can forget about most of them. In the free-for-all of UberEats, Soylent and other new modes of meeting our nutritional needs, it’s reassuring to eat by the rules again: to know that, no matter how much you jazz it up, there must be turkey (or the vegan equivalent) and stuffing and cranberry sauce on the table.

For all the cheer and the pies, there can be something a bit melancholy about holiday food (and I’m not just talking about the perennial disappointment that is eggnog). For a few days, we gather and treat food like it actually matters. And then we go back to normal life, where the question of what to cook for dinner falls lower on our list of priorities than what case to buy for our new iPhone.

Ms. Wilson is the author of “First Bite: How We Learn to Eat” and “Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat,” both published by Basic Books.

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