Beauty writers get sent skincare at Christmas; tech journos, I imagine, whatever is the 2020s equivalent of a Sega Mega Drive. As a food writer, I get gifted food. I’m not complaining — I’ll never go hungry, even if the three-month lead times in magazine publishing mean that I end up eating Easter eggs in December.
But for the past couple of Christmases I’ve noticed an unwelcome PR sweetener. The first one this year arrived at the end of November. I gave the tissue-wrapped parcel a hopeful prod — too big for a mince pie, but perhaps a Christmas pudding? Alas, my heart was already sinking faster than a Delia Smith soufflé. The uneven silhouette of a lumpen trapezium was the giveaway. This, without doubt, was a panettone.
I hate panettone. I contemplated re-gifting it without unwrapping, then remembered no one else I know likes panettone either. I turned to my partner James, a doctor who took a career break in Rome to become a Catholic priest, and asked him whether Italians send English people panettone as an ongoing punishment for the dissolution of the monasteries.
“I’d like it more if you could toast it, like a teacake, but it’s such an awkward shape that it takes too much effort,” he says. The seminarians, it seems, looked elsewhere for their daily bread at Christmas. “The common room would be full of panettone that had been bought as gifts, but none of us would eat it unless we were desperate.”
James phones his colleague Marco, a native of Abruzzo, and asks whether even Italian people like panettone. “I actually love it,” Marco says, “but the original one from Milan — not the crap you find here.” He favours the version from Marchesi 1824 which costs €48 a pop. “Most of the cheap British ones are either horribly sweet or too doughy.”
But in my experience, the usual sensation of a panettone is a claggy dryness that tastes like the opposite of Christmas comfort — the sort of cheerless crumb that Scrooge might toss to Tiny Tim. It lacks the heft of bread or the sweet succulence of fruitcake.
A couple of years ago I was sent a panettone from Gucci. The exquisite tin it came in lives on as a box for my Panama hat, which makes my head smell deliciously of dried fruit rather than melting hair wax on hot summer days. The panettone inside ended up as a bread-and-butter pudding, which is what many chefs recommend doing with it. Let it not be forgotten that the essential ingredient for bread-and-butter pudding is stale bread.
Might the problem simply be that authentic panettone is the pastry equivalent of Mateus Rosé: something that only tastes good on its home turf on holiday? I pose the question to Francesco Albanese, a London-based Italian baker who goes by @kneadingwithfranco to his eight thousand or so followers. He says the type of panettone that Brits find most palatable is the softer, more buttery version invented by Israeli-born, Texas-raised pastry chef Roy Shvartzapel, which swaps out raisins and candied orange for chocolate. Albanese is planning on selling his own version in the UK once he has perfected the pH level of the dough.
My grandmother was a home economics teacher, so I am well aware that much cooking is more domestic science than domestic goddess. But isn’t this talk about pH levels a bit antithetical to the heroically chaotic spirit of the traditional British Christmas? Surely it’s easier all round to haphazardly bung the ingredients for a fruitcake into a baking tin in October and hope for a Christmas miracle by the time December 25 rolls around than faff around with pH meters?
Actually, I hate Christmas cake too. And seasonal sandwiches from high-street chains. And I only really enjoy Christmas pudding for the calming hit of booze to take the edge off the stress of Christmas lunch. Could it be that I just hate Christmas? Bah humbug! And pass me that piece of Easter egg.
