how to feed eight improvisers
or eight of anyone, really
There are three things that I do every week: write this newsletter, go to the farmers market, and run an improv comedy night.
Days after moving to London almost nine years ago, I went to a live show of the RH Experience, an improv team I’d been watching on YouTube since my late teens. I’d never been to a live comedy show, but by the end of the night, I was hooked. Soon enough, I found myself surrounded by that elusive adult group of friends I had accidentally, effortlessly developed simply by stalwarting the hell out of London’s improv scene.
Some of my closest friends in that group were the team running Duck Duck Goose, a free South London jam and show I went to every Monday, which I eventually joined in 2019.
Weekly anything is a ton of work, and I can honestly say that we put even more effort into making this the best and most welcoming show we can every time, getting by on the power of friendship and pure stubbornness. So once a year, we get to throw ourselves a big Christmas party and spend a whole day eating and belly laughing together, without an audience.
For the second year running, after lots of begging my teammates to let me please please please cook for them, I hosted. My love of cooking, the joy I feel having my friends over and my desire to live my best Meredith Hayden life are only part of the reason why I keep wanting to spend 10 hours in the kitchen in one weekend; I also love a puzzle and an excuse for lists and spreadsheets.
Finding a whole December afternoon where eight people are all available is the first puzzle, as well as a damn Christmas miracle. Once that’s out of the way, the fun really starts a couple weeks out, when I text each member of the group to ask for their dietary requirements, any strong food dislikes, and whether there’s one dish in particular that they can’t imagine Christmas without1.
Then, it’s all about building the menu, in much the same way I write these posts: by vividly daydreaming about it when I really should be doing something else, dumping anything that crosses my mind onto a rambling note on my phone, then slowly chipping through it until something coherent and enjoyable emerges.
Finally, it’s on to the execution, which only happens thanks to the detailed game plan I wrote about in “make cooking boring”. Without it, we’d probably all have chicken sashimi and iced gravy for dinner.
I spread the cooking over about three days and used up every last piece of cookware, serving dish and square millimetre of fridge space I had. … I made multiple shopping lists and determined the perfect day to get ingredients to maximise freshness and storage space. I wrote the name of each dish on a sticky tab so I could keep track of what I would cook or serve it in. I worked backwards from the time a dish had to be ready, the oven temp it needed, whether it could be par-cooked, how long it should rest, and wrote myself instructions in 15-minute increments. I prepared lists of jobs my friends could help with ahead of time. And, if I may say so, we nailed it.
I went all out last year. In the afternoon, we snacked on home-cured beetroot gravadlax served on pikelets with sour cream and huge gherkins, and toasted sourdough bread dunked into two different baked camemberts (one with fig jam and rosemary, one with garlic, honey and chili flakes), all washed down with a vat of mulled wine simmering away on the stove. In the evening, I lined up a roast chicken in tarragon cream2, two trays of stuffing (one porky, one veggie), a mushroom pie my friend made, glazed shallots, roast potatoes and Brussel sprouts, a carrot salad, homemade cranberry sauce and two jugs of gravy (one vegetarian, one with chicken, both made truly from scratch including the stock) on my living room table. For dessert, one friend had made a mountain of melomakarona, and another had made a mighty bolo de bolacha I can only describe as “the weight of a toddler”.
Because comedic timing is everything, as soon as the last guest went stumbling home and I closed the fridge door onto the carefully balanced leftovers, I immediately started showing symptoms of gastro. After a sleepless and worried night, I was assured by everyone else that they were fine. I hadn’t accidentally given all my friends food poisoning the very first time I fed them. Regardless, after almost a week in bed surviving on plain tortillas, I had to throw the leftovers away.
Perhaps this also explains why I wanted to do it again this year: revenge. I wanted Christmas meal for lunch for three days in a row and, on Santa’s head, I was going to have it.
In the interim, I had also learned a few things, such as how to chill the fuck out. I also got trivets – last year’s Christmas meal is forever in my heart, but it’s also forever in my dining table in the form of heat damage.
After having to get rid of most of the cranberry sauce and gravies the previous year, which had taken me hours and didn’t even taste that special, I decided to get them from the store. I only made one stuffing – vegetarian, with smoked tofu and lots of sage. After spending ages carving a 2.8kg chicken I could barely manoeuvre and having to fight for a limited number of pieces of dark meat, I just got a bunch of legs and a couple of breasts from the butcher. I got rid of the glazed shallots, which were way too sweet (never trust an American recipe), and instead sliced a bunch and hid them underneath the chicken to mop up the juices. I did away with the salad and roasted the carrots this time. I added chestnuts. I did keep the gravadlax, baked camemberts and mulled wine though – it’s Christmas, goddamnit.
Does this all sound extra? Every person I’ve talked to about this has commented on the requests for food dislikes, or the detailed game plan, or the three-day cooking process, or the labels I put on the vegetarian dishes to avoid cross-contamination, and said that not everyone would bother. I can’t imagine not bothering.
Of the eight people currently on the team, three of us are immigrants (each from a different country), two are children of immigrants, and one is a vegetarian. One listed cranberry sauce as his “must have at Christmas” dish, and another listed it as his most hated food. There isn’t a single spot in this Venn diagram of Christmas traditions where all the circles overlap.
That’s also where starting the gravadlax curing process days in advance, going to five different market stalls and shops for a single dish and getting two of everything come in. I want to give each of my friends their very own magical Christmas. I’m not going to do that by forcing my family’s usual Christmas meal of foie gras, lumpfish roe, white pudding, chestnuts, cooked apples and yule log on them. We don’t even force it on my sister, who hates most of these things and instead gets all-you-can-eat smoked salmon every year. I’ve also made food my whole thing. I have street cred to uphold.
As for the game plan, while it does have a direct impact on the meal (no forgotten ingredient! Nothing over- or undercooked! No stone-cold food served directly next to a dish that may or may not give someone second-degree burns!), it’s mostly for me. I don’t work very fast, so I need to know exactly how long I can reasonably give myself. There’s also a very fine line between a fun challenge and full spiralling for me, and I deserve a magical Christmas, too.
I’m now off to France to spend the holidays with my family, where I look forward to putting my feet up and funneling the same foods down my throat as last year, and the year before that, and the year before that one. But of all the things I’m grateful for this year, continuing to create new traditions with my silly group of friends, brought together by a shared love for playing make-believe (funny edition) at the back of pubs has to take the crown.
Happy whatever you get up to in the next two weeks, from the Eurostar lounge, with love.
That’s a modification of a tip I got from my dinner-party-queen mother, who used to have a notebook where she kept track of her friends’ most or least favourite foods and drinks, and what she’d previously cooked for them so she wouldn’t repeat menus. I do that in a spreadsheet. Shocker.
This is of course Julius Roberts’s “Epic tarragon roast chicken”, the crowd pleaser of all crowd pleasers.