23 Dec 2025
For Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, it wouldn’t be Christmas without salmon…
This is the third column I’m writing at Christmas time for these fair pages. I have purposefully not looked back at what I’ve written before in order to circumvent the law of attraction, because if I’m trying not to repeat past musings, re-reading them will mean I can think of nothing else.
I imagine, however, that I will have mentioned how Christmases have always been untraditional for me, and how they remain so to this day.
The predominant cause is being half-Italian: traditional British fare wasn’t part of my mum’s repertoire in the kitchen and so it rarely landed on the table. In fact, we remember with a great deal of amusement the time my mother attempted bread-and-butter pudding, which was more of a grey sludge than a dessert.
Fortunately, for every culinary mishap there were about a thousand triumphs, and this is how my brother and I both grew up passionate cooks. Christmases as a child were about departures from typical food: we’d have delights like grouse, lobster or whole trout to gobble down, with no ‘trimmings’ as such but plenty of sides and all awash with flavour.
With no rules to follow, no traditions, the Christmas meal was quite stress-free. I recall a conversation I had a year or two ago with my friend Rachel, who believes that Christmas dinner stress is entirely down to the fact that everyone has their own version of ‘traditional’.
Her sister likes bread sauce with her turkey, the in-laws must have cranberry sauce, and the uncle’s entire Christmas is ruined unless the stuffing comes in balls rather than a slice.
I’ve made those details up, but it was along those lines. Rachel wasn’t playing the blame game, I should add, because she freely admitted her own yuletide foibles alongside everyone else’s, but she pretty astutely identified them as the cause of a host’s main challenge: satisfying everyone’s Christmas wishes.
So, steering clear of too many mealtime musts at Christmas has certainly been freeing. However, rather perversely, I find myself these days looking to include a few traditional elements in the festive feasting, rather than avoiding them.
Perhaps they appeal precisely because there’s I feel no obligation towards them. For example, a smoked salmon blini in all its eighties glory has found its way into my heart as a Christmas Day appetiser. I tend to mix some crème fraîche with jarred cream of horseradish to spread on the blini before laying over the unctuous smoked salmon.
The combination of these contrasting flavours atop a lightly toasted blini pancake is delicious and catapults me into a festive frenzy. If you want to go fancy, a drizzle of dill oil, a wisp of edible gold leaf or some beetroot powder sprinkled over give a beautiful effect.
These are also a light way to start off the serious business of Christmas eating, and also extremely simple to pull together, both welcome features that rank highly in my book.
Another traditional morsel that I’ve adopted is the pig in blanket. Or, as Jamie Oliver terms it, the pig out of its blanket. I came across this recipe by one of my all-time favourite chefs a few years ago and you can find it easily online. I’ve adapted it a little.
The main draw for me was that it combined this well-known Christmas trimming with pasta – a true constant in my culinary past, present and future. This recipe perfectly encapsulated both the British and Italian sides of my culture and it’s become a firm favourite, whether we eat it as a bowl of festive promise on Christmas Eve, or on the big day itself as a frivolous ‘primo piatto’ between our starter and the main event.
Take fresh lasagne sheets and use a star-shaped cookie cutter to stamp out pieces. Use the off-cuts too, but try and hide them a little under the stars when it comes to plating up.
Take some sausages and remove the skins, then pull the meat apart into rough chunks – these are your ‘pigs’. Chop up some bacon – or the ‘blankets’ that the pigs aren’t in – and pop all the meat in a medium-hot pan with a drizzle of oil, some sage leaves and some finely diced courgette. Fry everything until crozzled (my word for caught at the edges).
Next, add your pasta stars (and cut-offs), ideally separated rather than in clumps so that they can cook evenly, then add enough boiling water to just cover the contents of the pan. Err on the side of too little water than too much, because you can always add a splash more liquid if the pasta’s not cooked through yet. Too much water will mean you end up with a weak sort of broth dish, when what you’re aiming for is a deliciously emulsified sauce born out of the starch from the pasta and the savoury oils from the meat.
A good handful or two of grated parmesan helps bring the dish together, as well as adding yet more umami richness to the dish. This is my kind of Christmas star – one made of pasta that I can devour. Merry Christmas!
