In praise of … Christmas leftovers

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/in-praise-of-christmas-leftovers

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There are those who believe that the right way to dispose of Christmas leftovers is to put them in a foot-deep trench in the garden, cover them reverentially with a layer of coloured paper hats and then stamp and tamp them down under six inches of heavy clay. Others, including distinguished writers in this paper's second sections and magazine, offer each year increasingly eccentric recipes for transforming them into new dishes. Do other countries do this? Do the French whip up the leftover bûche de noël into a souffle for New Year's Eve ? Do the Germans pack stale lebkuchen into a sort of omelette as a hangover cure? Do the Hungarians mash up their uneaten carp? We don't think so. It is only the Anglo-Saxons who show this kind of stiff-upper-lip bravery in the face of unpalatable objects. It is down, no doubt, to guilt. Why did we buy so much ? What was I thinking? Why did Uncle Reg and his family not turn up at the last minute? Who gave us that caterer's bag of parsnips? These are the kind of fundamental questions that have to be confronted in the Christmas aftermath. To cope with them one must undergo the passage from gratification to mortification represented by the heroic processing of sprouts into something completely different, the blast-freezing of Christmas pudding into shards, white-sauce croquettes, and the dreaded marriage of turkey with packet curry powder. It is, to tell the truth, a yearly demonstration, in its quiet way, of the pluck and grit that made this nation great.

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