Turkey is compulsory now, but it is the newcomer at the table. For most of British history the Christmas roast was goose — and the bird that displaced it had to cross an ocean, charm a king and wait three hundred years for its moment.
An American bird arrives in Tudor England
Turkeys are native to the Americas, and the traditional story credits a Yorkshire landowner, William Strickland, with bringing six of them back from the New World and selling them in Bristol in the 1520s. The tale should be handled with tongs — the historian Alison Weir has pointed out that Strickland may not even have been born by then — but something stuck, because in 1550 Strickland was granted a coat of arms featuring “a Turkeycocke in his pride proper.” Whoever landed them, turkeys were in England by the mid-sixteenth century, and Henry VIII is said to have been the first English king to eat one at Christmas.
Goose holds the table for three centuries
Royal fashion did not translate into national habit. Turkey stayed a rich man’s showpiece while goose remained the predominant Christmas roast right up to the Victorian era — which is why, in A Christmas Carol (1843), the Cratchits are sitting down to a goose, and the transformed Scrooge signals the scale of his change of heart by sending them the enormous prize turkey instead. Dickens was not describing the norm; he was describing an upgrade.
The Victorians and after
The turkey’s victory came gradually: Victorian aspiration, better rearing and transport, a reputed royal endorsement from Edward VII, and eventually the post-war arrival of affordable farmed birds. By the mid-twentieth century the swap was complete, and goose — the actual tradition — now reads as the exotic choice.
Source: Tastes of History and Rosemary Griggs on the Strickland story
Dressed for the carving
Whoever carves gets photographed doing it. A cardigan is the carver’s friend — smart in the picture, open by the second helping. The stuffing to go with the bird is covered in our sage and onion recipe.
More table-ready knits in the Men’s Christmas Jumpers collection.