At Grantley Hall, a rural Yorkshire hotel so fancy they pipe jazz around the car park, there are various food offerings this Christmas Day. One of them, from the much-admired chef Shaun Rankin, is entitled the Taste of Home menu. It’s an interesting title, because it acknowledges something: that despite our growing comfort with paying others to cook for us, choosing to eat out on 25 December is still regarded as subversive and decadent. Christmas dinner is the one remaining domestic feast. It’s the one day of the year when we strap ourselves to the stove and cook a complex multistage meal, packed full of adored convention and cliche. And yet amazingly, some people choose to get out the credit card and leave the house.
So what is Rankin’s taste of home? It starts with sourdough, cultured butters and beef tea, continues through “scallop, celeriac, pine”, and ends with a tarte tatin and mince pies. In between, there’s the comforting sound of “traditional roast Norfolk Bronze turkey”, though as the butter is clearly more cultured than I am and the scallop comes with pine, who knows what that means. If you want to taste Mr Rankin’s home it will cost you £275 a head. Roll your eyes all you like, but remember there are people giving up their Christmas Day to cook this. It should cost.
