Mock turkey and other forgotten festive traditions

With shoppers ordering the perfect plump turkey months in advance and clamouring for beautifully-wrapped treats from high-end supermarkets before they sell out, many families endeavour to enjoy a luxury modern-day Christmas.

But in previous decades – particularly during wartime rations – people were forced to strive for much simpler and cheaper festivities.

From an odd-looking fake turkey to roasting apples in ale to give to your work colleagues, many of those traditions have disappeared.

The team at the Black Country Living Museum, who immerse themselves daily in the lifestyles of our ancestors, explain what Christmas used to look like in years gone by.

“A mock turkey has sausage meat in it, but it’s mixed with breadcrumbs, onions, apples, a bit of sage for tasting and then you decorate it with carrots and streaky bacon.”

During a scarcity of food in World War Two there were “lots of creative recipes”, museum researcher Clare Weston said.

There were chocolate recipes with “very little chocolate in and sometimes more potato” and a Christmas cake included “what was available”.

“It would be very low on things like sugars and fats,” she explained.

After mentioning the Christmas turkey tradition from the Victorian era onwards, the researcher said: “I think it’s really that whole sort of [Charles] Dickens thing that popularises this idea of a big turkey being cooked.

“But it’s for those who could afford it.”

A bowl “brimming with sliced cucumber and onion soaked in vinegar”, known as The Soak, was described by the museum as a “Black Country culinary staple, often eaten at Christmas”.

Seen in a house at the Dudley museum decorated in a 1960s style and featuring an old-style Quality Street box, the salad dish included Spanish onion, “a sweeter onion than your cooking onions”, and was perhaps seasoned with salt and pepper.

“I have never had it, even at my gran’s [home] in the 70s,” the researcher said.

“It was on the buffet trolley, hostess trolley. I just couldn’t touch it, but I’m not a big fan of raw cucumber, raw onion. But my brother would drink it practically.”

Families would traditionally make a new rag rug every year in the run-up to Christmas and children would help cut up the rags for it.

“It was quite common in the Black Country to make a new one for Christmas to go in front of the fire,” Mrs Weston highlighted.

“The older ones would migrate towards the back door or the front door.”

A hessian sack, used for things like potatoes, vegetables and coal, could come from a greengrocer and form the backing of the rug, while “beyond being used” clothing was cut into strips, as “nothing went to waste”.

“You’d use an instrument called a podger in the Black Country… you would push the fabric through the hessian sack… and that gradually forms a really lovely tufted rug.”

“Lambswool – I love the name, it’s an old-fashioned Christmassy-time drink.

“It’s common throughout the UK, but in the Black Country it was known to be made for workers. Managers would give it to workers.”

Still made today but particularly popular in the Victorian period, this traditional festive drink of roasted apples in strong ale would be served in a large bowl called a jowl, the researcher said.

“They had to keep going until it was finished and it’s quite a large bowl and then they’d finish with singing a carol.”

She said “you’d mix it with a bit of” nutmeg, ginger and sugar and if “you didn’t strain it, you would see the apple kind of pulp in the drink”.

Also, people could “have tipples of home-made wines”, things like parsnip wine and elderberry wine, made in their washhouse where laundry was done.

In the Victorian era, an “ordinary working class family… would probably go and forage for some holly, some ivy, cut that and hang it”.

But Mrs Weston said as you move into the mid 20th Century people could start to buy artificial trees and there was tinsel.

They were able to get those ‘trees’ in the 1930s and places like Woolworths sold the “quite spindly” items.

“They might still have candle holders on them, so you could light candles on them, people were still doing that in the mid 20th Century.”

The researcher said in the early 20th Century at Christmas religion played “a big part”, but while people would go to church “there’d also be other entertainment”.

“You might go to concerts at big venues. You might on Christmas Day itself stand around a piano. One of the family members could play and you’d sing carols.”

One event in December 1924 was at the Methodist church that was built in 1837, closed in the 1970s and was moved brick by brick and reconstructed at the Midlands museum.

Charles Dickens had gone on tours reading his A Christmas Carol after his first such event attended by 2,000 in Birmingham in the 1850s.

More than 40 years after the author died, a man from London read his story at the chapel in Netherton in Dudley and attracted hundreds of wellwishers.

BCLM has previously said many traditions “have been shaped by centuries of changing beliefs, politics, technology, taste, and commerce”.

Mrs Weston pointed out “there’s always fashion influences” with decorations.

“Christmas has evolved over the last 100, 150 years. A lot of it has depended on economics, what people could afford, but also the availability of more products for Christmas.”