The Latlight Christmas Calendar

This is the oldest recipe in the calendar. Around 160 BC the Roman statesman Cato the Elder wrote De Agri Cultura, a handbook for running a farm, and among its recipes is one for mustacei: wheat flour moistened with grape must, anise, cumin, lard and cheese, shaped into cakes and baked on bay leaves.

Mustacei were festive cakes, served at weddings and big family meals. Rome's great winter feast was Saturnalia in December, a week of gifts, banquets and role reversal that left traces in later Christmas customs. Must is fresh grape juice, still unfermented; unsweetened red grape juice is the closest you can buy today.

Dulcia domestica means “home-made sweets”. The recipe comes from Apicius, a Roman cookbook put together around the 4th or 5th century from much older recipes: remove the stones from dates, stuff them with nuts, pine kernels or ground pepper, salt the outside and fry them in cooked honey.

Sweets, dried figs and dates were classic Saturnalia gifts in December, sent to friends together with little clay figurines. Salt and pepper on a honey sweet may sound odd, but it is exactly what makes these addictive.

Conditum paradoxum, “surprising spiced wine”, is the very first recipe in Apicius. Honey is boiled with a little wine, then flavoured with pepper, mastic, bay, saffron and roasted date stones, and finally mixed with a much larger amount of wine.

Honeyed, peppery wines like this were drunk at Roman banquets in winter, and they are the distant ancestor of mulled wine and hippocras, which comes two doors later in this calendar. Pepper is the “surprise”: it was an expensive import from India, and a sign of a rich host.

Kutia is eaten on Christmas Eve across Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and eastern Poland, and at Orthodox Christmas in Russia. Whole wheat stands for life and harvest, poppy seed for abundance, and honey for a sweet year ahead. Everyone at the table must eat at least a spoonful.

The dish is probably much older than Christianity: boiled grain with honey was also a food for remembering the dead, and in many families a spoonful of kutia was traditionally left out for the ancestors on Christmas Eve.

Panforte means “strong bread”, for its powerful spices. Its ancestor, a honey-and-pepper bread called panpepato, is often said to appear in a document from Siena in 1205, as a tax of honey and pepper bread owed to a convent. Spices from the East came into Siena on the pilgrim road to Rome, and the city's spice merchants turned them into this Christmas cake.

The white version dusted with icing sugar, called Panforte Margherita, is said to have been made in 1879 for Queen Margherita's visit to Siena. It keeps for weeks wrapped in paper, which is why it travelled well in medieval times.

Frumenty, from the Latin frumentum, “grain”, is in The Forme of Cury, written around 1390 by the master cooks of King Richard II of England: wheat pounded and boiled, then cooked with milk and egg yolks and coloured with saffron. At royal feasts it was served with venison or porpoise.

In the north of England, frumenty stayed a Christmas Eve tradition for centuries, eaten with cheese and Christmas cake. It is also the drink that sets off the story in Thomas Hardy's novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, laced with rum.

Hippocras was the spiced, sweetened wine of the medieval and Tudor upper classes, served at the end of a great feast with wafers and sweet spices. The Forme of Cury, written for Richard II around 1390, gives a recipe, and French cookbooks of the same time have their own.

Its name comes from the cone-shaped cloth bag used to strain it, called a “Hippocrates' sleeve” after the Greek doctor, because apothecaries used the same filter for their medicines. Grains of paradise, a peppery seed from West Africa, were one of its key spices.

Lebkuchen are recorded in Nuremberg from 1395, and by the 15th century the city had its own guild of Lebküchner, gingerbread bakers. Nuremberg was on the great trade routes from Venice, so it had pepper, cinnamon and cloves, and the forests around it gave honey. Monks there were said to have baked Lebkuchen too.

The finest kind, Elisenlebkuchen, is made almost entirely of nuts, with very little or no flour, and baked on a thin wafer called an Oblate, a habit that comes from the communion wafers of the monasteries. Today “Nürnberger Lebkuchen” is a protected name in the EU.

The galette des rois is eaten in France for Epiphany on 6 January, the day the three kings reached Bethlehem, the end of the twelve days of Christmas. Choosing a “king” with a bean hidden in a cake is a medieval custom, and some historians link it to the Roman Saturnalia, when a mock king was chosen by lot.

The puff pastry and almond-cream version is the Paris style; in the south of France a brioche ring with candied fruit is eaten instead. Since the 19th century the dried bean, the fève, has often been replaced by small porcelain figures, and collecting them even has its own name: fabophilia.

Stollen is first mentioned in Dresden in 1474, in an account of the city's Bartholomew hospital, as Christbrot, “Christ bread”. Its shape, a loaf folded over with a ridge down the middle, is said to look like the Christ child wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Early stollen was a poor thing, because during Advent, a time of fasting, butter was forbidden. The princes of Saxony asked Rome again and again for permission, and in 1490 Pope Innocent VIII finally sent the famous “butter letter” allowing it. Dresden still holds a Stollen festival with a giant loaf cut by a two-metre knife.

Today's mince pies are sweet, but the Tudor “Christmas pie” or “shrid pie” was filled with shredded meat, usually mutton or beef, mixed with suet, dried fruit and the expensive spices brought home by the Crusaders. Sweet and savoury were not yet separated, and spices on meat showed off a family's wealth.

A popular story says the pies were baked oblong to look like the manger, and that Oliver Cromwell banned them. In fact the Puritan Parliament banned Christmas celebrations as a whole in 1647, not pies in particular. Over the 18th and 19th centuries the meat slowly disappeared, leaving only the suet as a reminder.

“Wassail” comes from the Old English wes hál, “be well”. On Twelfth Night, the end of Christmas, a large bowl of hot spiced ale was passed around and people went from house to house singing. In cider country, people also wassailed the apple trees, pouring ale on their roots to bless the next harvest.

The drink in the bowl was often lambswool: hot ale with roasted apples whose soft white pulp bursts out and floats on top like fleece. The poet Robert Herrick wrote about it in a Twelfth Night poem published in 1648: “Next crown the bowl full / With gentle lamb's wool”.

On 13 December Sweden celebrates St Lucia's Day. In the dark morning, a girl in a white dress with a crown of candles leads a procession singing and bringing coffee, ginger biscuits and lussekatter, “Lucia's cats”, saffron buns curled into an S with raisin eyes.

Under the old calendar, 13 December was the longest night of the year, and in folk belief evil spirits were loose. One story says the devil came as a cat and handed out buns to children, and Lucia's golden saffron buns were meant to keep him away. Saffron buns are mentioned in western Sweden from the 17th century; the modern Lucia procession spread in the early 1900s.

In the Netherlands and Belgium, presents come on 5 December, the eve of St Nicholas, when Sinterklaas arrives. Speculaas, thin spiced biscuits pressed into carved wooden moulds, are part of the feast. The moulds show windmills, ships, animals and St Nicholas himself, and old ones are now collected like small works of art.

The name may come from the Latin speculum, “mirror”, because the biscuit is a mirror image of the mould, or from speculator, “one who watches over”, a title of the bishop. Spice biscuits like these became common in the 17th century, when the Dutch East India Company made the Netherlands the centre of the European spice trade.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, a rich English Christmas dinner began with plum pottage: beef broth thickened with breadcrumbs and full of prunes, raisins, currants, wine, sugar and spices. “Plum” then meant any dried fruit, and especially prunes and raisins.

Over time the pottage got thicker and thicker, the meat disappeared, and it was boiled in a cloth instead of a pot. That is how plum pottage became plum pudding, which you will find behind door 18 as Christmas pudding. Plum pottage was still served at the royal court until the 1800s.

Before the turkey, the goose was the great Christmas bird of northern Europe. Geese were fattened on the stubble after the harvest and were at their best in late autumn and winter, which is why they were eaten on St Martin's Day in November and again at Christmas. In Germany, Denmark and Poland the Christmas goose with apples is still a tradition.

In Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), the poor Cratchit family's Christmas dinner is a small goose, and Scrooge, changed, sends them a giant turkey: a sign of how the turkey was replacing the goose in Victorian England. Do not throw away the fat: it makes the best roast potatoes.

Posset is one of the oldest English hot drinks, known since the 15th century: hot milk curdled with ale or wine, sweetened and spiced. It was drunk as a cure for colds, served to guests on winter nights and given to newly married couples at their wedding, and wealthy households had special spouted posset pots for it.

Shakespeare mentions it more than once: in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth drugs the guards' possets. Over the centuries the curd part turned into today's thick lemon posset dessert, but the old hot posset is the one for a Christmas night.

Plum pudding is much older, but the name “Christmas pudding” first appears in Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families in 1845. Acton was one of the first cookbook writers to list exact quantities and cooking times for every recipe, and this is based on her own pudding, which she proudly called “The Author's Christmas Pudding”.

Tradition says it is made on “Stir-up Sunday”, the last Sunday before Advent, named after the church prayer that begins “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord”. Everyone stirs from east to west, for the journey of the three kings, and a silver coin is sometimes stirred in for luck.

For centuries families in France and much of Europe burned a great log on the hearth over Christmas, the Yule log. It was chosen with care, sometimes blessed or sprinkled with wine, and its ashes were kept to protect the house from lightning and illness through the coming year.

As big open fireplaces gave way to iron stoves in the 19th century, the log moved from the fire to the table: Parisian pastry cooks began making a rolled sponge cake decorated as a log. It is now the classic French Christmas dessert, and every pâtisserie competes to make the most beautiful one.

The best-known legend says panettone was born at the 15th-century court of Ludovico il Moro in Milan: the cook burned the Christmas cake, and a kitchen boy called Toni saved the day with a sweet bread made from his own leftover dough, “pan de Toni”. It is a lovely story, but there is no evidence for it.

What is certain is that sweet Christmas breads were baked in Milan for centuries, and that the tall domed panettone we know today was created in the 20th century by Milanese bakers. In 1919 Angelo Motta gave it its height by letting the dough rise three times in a tall paper collar, and factories made it famous around the world.

No Greek Christmas is complete without melomakarona, soft spiced biscuits made with olive oil and orange, soaked in honey syrup and covered in walnuts. They are made without butter or eggs, so they fit the Orthodox fast before Christmas, which lasts 40 days.

The name joins meli, “honey”, with makaria, a word linked to a Byzantine bread served at funeral meals for the dead, the same root as the Italian “macaroni”. Over the centuries the funeral bread became a sweet for the happiest feast of the year.

In Poland, Christmas Eve, Wigilia, begins when the first star appears. The supper has no meat and traditionally twelve dishes, one for each apostle, an extra place is laid for an unexpected guest, and the meal begins with sharing a thin wafer. Clear red barszcz with uszka, “little ears” filled with forest mushrooms, is usually the first course.

Barszcz started as a soup made from the hogweed plant (barszcz in Polish) and only later became a beetroot soup. Traditionally it is soured with a fermented beet starter made a week in advance; lemon juice is the quick modern shortcut.

Lithuanians call Christmas Eve Kūčios, and its supper has twelve meatless dishes. Kūčiukai, small crunchy yeast biscuits with poppy seed, are a must, eaten soaked in sweet poppy-seed milk. Hay is spread under the tablecloth to remember the manger, and a place is often left empty for family members who died that year.

Many Kūčios customs are older than Christianity. Pulling a straw from under the tablecloth tells your future: a long one means a long life. The food is also left on the table overnight, so that the souls of the ancestors can come and eat.

Grey peas, a large dark pea grown in the Baltics, are the most Latvian dish of all and a must on the Christmas Eve table, together with pork, sauerkraut and gingerbread. In Latvia, Ziemassvētki (Christmas) mixes Christian feast and ancient winter-solstice customs, from dragging a log around the village to burning it, to mummers in masks.

The folk belief is that you must eat all your peas on Christmas Eve: every pea left on the plate means a tear in the coming year. Another custom says that the more peas you eat, the more money you will have. Either way, finish your bowl.