無料体験レッスン アクセス 06-4397-0170
What\’s for dinner? Christmas dinner vocabulary
Hello all! With Christmas approaching, let\’s make the final preparations for Christmas dinner together. What is a traditional Christmas dinner like? It seems we\’ll find out at the 大阪夕陽ヶ丘英会話! You can use this Christmas dinner vocabulary to ask your British friends what they had, and you are sure to impress!
Different dishes
The main part of a Christmas dinner is roast turkey, with stuffing and roast vegetables.
Stuffing is a mixture that we put inside the turkey before roasting. As such, the most common one is made of sage and onions. Furthermore, sage is an aromatic herb.
The roast veg include carrots, turnips, and parsnips. Parsnips are not very common in Japan but they are a staple (= a main food) of British Sunday roasts.
With the roast, we serve mashed potatoes and gravy. Gravy is a thick sauce made with the juice of the meat that you get while cooking, mixed with other ingredients.
We also serve cranberry sauce with Christmas dinner. It\’s a thick sauce or relish. Relish is a cooked and pickled sauce served with a staple food. It may look like jam but it\’s different, the jam on your toast is not pickled! Rather, relish is a condiment, which is a product (a spice, or a sauce) that is used in small quantities to enhance the flavour of food. That is to say, to make it better and stronger. For example, with foie gras you can eat fig relish. As such, it enhances the flavour of foie gras.
Dessert
Dessert is an important part of Christmas dinner and we usually serve Christmas pudding, which is a traditional cake with dried fruit and brandy that is usually made well in advance. You can prepare it up to a year in advance! To give you an idea of the many ingredients, you can have a look at this recipe from BBC Good Food. We can also serve fruit cake or apple pie for dessert.
Christmas pudding
Throughout the Christmas period, we eat sweet mince pies, made of mincemeat. What is mincemeat? Contrary to what its name suggests, it is a mixture of dried fruit, alcohol, and spices. Nonetheless, traditionally, in medieval times, it really contained meat. Originally, this mixture of fruit, alcohol and spices was used to preserve meat. In fact, if you look at medieval recipes, you can find many dishes made with mincemeat, after spices were brought to Europe from the Middle East by the Crusaders.
In a nutshell
Let\’s sum up the Christmas dinner vocabulary we\’ve learnt today:
- stuffing
- parsnips
- sage
- relish
- a staple food
- to enhance something
- a condiment
- gravy
- mincemeat
and some dishes:
- roast turkey
- cranberry sauce
- Christmas pudding
- mince pies
We\’ve wrapped the presents, the dinner preparations are going well, Happy Christmas everyone!
See you soon for another edition of mini-lessons from 大阪夕陽ヶ丘英会話!
