When I was in the ninth grade, I sang in our high school choir. Our choir director, who was also our band director, was one of my favorite teachers during my high school years. He pushed us as musicians, introducing challenging music and teaching us about music history as we learned. I don’t remember much about our Christmas music concert that year, except that I had a sort solo. I sang one verse of a 15th century English Christmas Carol. It was a very minor part of the program. There were other students with voices more clear, precise, and better trained than mine who had bigger parts. But, like other music that I have learned over the years, the song stuck with me. I don’t remember the entire carol, but I know the first verse:

“The boar’s head in hand bring I,
Bedeck’d with bays and rosemary.
And I pray you , my masters, merry be
As many as are at the feast!”

I’ve never actually been anywhere where boar’s head was served. I’ve attended a couple of fancy dinners that had medieval feast reenactment features and at one of them there was a paper mache boar’s head complete with an apple in its mouth that was arranged on a platter and placed on the table as a decoration, but I can’t tell you what boar’s head tastes like.

I looked up Boar’s Head on the Internet and the possible recipes I found don’t sound like something we would do in our house. One possible method starts with slicing off the boar’s face and pickling it and the meat from inside the head in salt for several weeks. The cured meat is then chopped an mixed with bacon and spices and some of the meat from the pig’s shoulder which are stuffed back into the skull of the boar, It is then wrapped in muslin to recreate the shape of the pig’s head. It is then boiled for hours and served on a bed of carrots, parsnips, and onions. One recipe called for decorating the boar’s head with ash to look like the fur of the animal.

One place where they do serve boar’s head every year, although I don’t know what recipe they use, is Oxford University in England. At Queen’s College there is an annual Boar’s Head Gaudy which is a feast complete with pickled boar’s head and the carol sung by a full choir. The tradition has been going on for centuries. It started as a Christmas feast for college members who remained on campus during the holidays and now is a firmly entrenched tradition occurring on the Saturday before Christmas.

Feasting is part of Christmas traditions going back for a very long time. An archivist at the University of Oxford, Chris Woolgar, wrote a book, “The Culture of Food in England, 1200 - 1500.” It isn’t exactly the type of recipe book one might give for Christmas, and I’ve never seen the actual book, though I suppose it might be found in a library. I did, however, read a BBC piece that quoted part of the book as it reported the menu of the Christmas dinner served by Richard Mitford, Bishop of Salisbury for 97 people. On the menu was half a cow, three sheep, 24 rabbits, a pig, half a wild boar, seven piglets, two swans, two woodcocks, four mallard ducks, 20 snipes, 10 capons, and three teal ducks. that’s a lot of meat, and there was fish as well: 50 pickled herrings, 50 salted herrings, 3 conga eels, 200 oysters and 100 whelks.

You might ask, “What, no Turkey?” Well you might not ask, but for the purposes of this journal entry, I need to introduce the topic. Because we often eat turkey for our Christmas dinner. At our house yesterday, turkey was the only mean on the menu, and we had quite a feast with homemade rolls, cranberry sauce, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, yams, green bean casserole, a fruit plate, and more. We didn’t serve boar’s head.

Turkeys are not native to Europe, so the bird became part of menus in that continent only after explorers had reached Central America and returned with the birds. And turkey didn’t become a regular feature in Christmas dinners until it was made popular by the publication of Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol,” in the middle of the 19th century. In that story the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is shown the error of his ways by three ghosts and has a change of heart that is shown by his procuring a turkey and having it sent to his underpaid clerk for their Christmas Day dinner.

I suppose that one of the reasons we serve Turkey for Christmas is that it is easy to procure and prepare. Our Co-op grocery store takes orders for holiday turkeys a month in advance of the festivities. If we forget, it is easy to get a frozen turkey in almost any grocery store. a 15-pound turkey will thaw in the refrigerator in four days and can be cooked in a bit less than 4 hours. It will produce plenty of drippings for gravy and provide plenty of leftovers for turkey sandwiches, turkey tetrazzini, and other fun dishes. One of our favorite parts of a turkey dinner is the soup made from the leftover turkey. We like to add chunks of turkey meat and egg noodles to the soup stock. Here is where having memorized the boar’s head song comes in handy. Add a couple of bay leaves and a bit of rosemary (“Bedeck’d with bays and rosemary”).

It is all a whole lot simpler than serving Boar’s Head. Perhaps that is why you hear a whole lot more about turkey than boar’s head for Christmas dinners these days. Whatever is on the menu, of course, the best part of any feast is the people with whom you share it. The two-year-old at our table might have eaten only pomegranate had he been allowed, but the dish was hidden away from his sight. The eleven year old really enjoyed the yams, spiced with paprika and cumin. The thirteen-year-old packed away a lot of mashed potatoes, and the seven-year old went for the kiwi. Everyone seemed to enjoy the homemade clover leaf rolls made from whole wheat flour from Montana, which is a tradition of my family. But the real star of the show was the turkey. We didn’t have need of anything else.

And we have turkey soup to look forward to this week.