Which mince pies won our Best Buy prize?

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I have just noticed, after all these years, that underneath the box where I am inserting my reply it says “You are signed in as John Ward / Sign out”.

It’s a bit superfluous because you have to click on Reply to see this. Having the option in the drop-down from your username seems adequate.

Edit – We seem to be in a Convo about mince pies.

Yes, I’ve eaten mine; it was lovely. I think we’ve finished here as well now.

Thankfully John brought this top back from the off…. 🙂
I don’t much like mince pies; most are too sweet.

I can’t stand hot ones, and, yes, most are too sweet.

I don’t understand why mince pies – a simple and basic product – have become such important items in the run-up to the festive season. Who cares whose are the best? – they are all awful and unnecessary. For some time now Aldi have held the crown in Which?’s tests for taste and value for money, but recently Iceland have been claiming theirs are the best, beating all rivals, and now M&S proclaim theirs are the finest examples. Convention dictates that we shall serve mince pies this year but they will be from Aldi again. We could not go against the Which? experts’ judgment.

And another thing . . . why is mulled wine such a Christmastime staple? It’s dreadful – a poor wine ruined. And Prosecco . . . how has that come to dominate the supermarket wine racks? It’s a parody of sophistication like the Ferrero Rocher ambassador’s choccies. It’s a testament to the power of marketing that’s for sure and brand-upmanship.

Here’s a little Christmas puzzle: we’ve all seen the Christmas menus in the pubs and restaurants. What are “all the trimmings”? Apart from the roast turkey, vegetables and other eatables on the plate, what else are we entitled to expect? Is the stuffing a “trimming”, and the cranberry sauce, or a little Yorkshire pudding? Or is it one of the pathetic accessories like the cheapest crackers that money can buy and a party popper? I wish there were a standard definition of ‘all the trimmings’, because, when I ask, no one seems to know and they quickly run out of ideas saying ” well . . . you know, all the bits and pieces . . .”. Not the giblets, surely?

I shall give humbugs this year [as usual].

As far as I know, the trimmings, in addition to the turkey, include sprouts and chestnuts, pigs in blankets, cranberry sauce, bread sauce, several stuffings, proper gravy, carrots, roast potatoes, creamed potatoes, peas, fried parsnips. Most of it goes cold before you can eat it, unless you are given relatively tiny amounts – not the British way.

Prosecco, like much Champagne, is poor quality. And I don’t have the money to spend £10 a glass on a respectable champers. But I do like fizzy white – a Loire is often a good bet.

When we had the children at home we bought cracker kits and filled them ourselves with “targeted” and useful contents, or cheapish crackers, to take full advantage of the awful jokes, with separate small presents.

A Christmas sandwich does not excite me in any way. I’m not a great fan of turkey.

Why we find the bloat of a Christmas Dinner to be a celebration I’m really not sure, but it’s a tradition and if we didn’t have turkey the family would be very displeased. I’d settle for a sirloin joint or rack of lamb.

Anyway bah to your humbug.

That’s an intriguing question, John, and which – when asked by me as a tiny child – got nothing remotely informative by way of a response. So over the years I’ve been attempting to fathom just exactly what ‘trimmings’ might constitute.

Trimmings, generally, are the bits that fall off – the unwanted bits which are part of the process of shaping something desirable for the person who can afford it. They can also be the pretty bits on a dress, but over time “the trimmings” in the sense we’re discussing have really evolved into a form of adjectival phrase with very little meaning in and of itself.

Presumably, if you went for your Xmas lunch at a restaurant and asked for “Turkey without all the trimmings, please”, you’d be presented with a gobbet of avian offcut and nothing else. If you were lucky it might actually have glimpsed the inside of an oven at some point, so you weren’t reduced to a squirming mass of vomiting humanity, shortly to be temporarily incarcerated in the intensive care unit.

Merry Xmas.