Something sweetly suitable to sip over Christmas

Tesco Finest LBV Port, Douro, Portugal 2017 (£13.50, Tesco ) Such is the strength of its association with that most festive of cheeses, stilton, Port, I suspect, remains the Christmas fortified wine for a vast majority of people. It’s a position I agree with to the extent that I can’t imagine being without a bottle or two at this time of year, even as I would argue that this great Portuguese wine can be every bit as wonderful well after the decorations have come down. The choice this year could come from the following bottles, starting with two own-label staples: the dark, brambly berry and black-cherry-rich Late Bottled Vintage style made for Tesco by the reliable British shippers, Symington Family Estates, and the softer, dried fruit, and fresh-packet-of-muscovado sugar stylings of the wood-aged M&S 10 Year Old Tawny Port NV (£20) made for M&S by Taylor’s. I’d also be tempted by the sumptuous, complex, perfectly ready-to-drink single-quinta vintage port, Graham’s Quinta dos Malvedos 2012 (£33.99, Waitrose).

Gonzalez Byass Matusalem 30 Year Old Oloroso, Jerez, Spain NV (from £25.49, 37.5cl, waitrosecellar.com ; majestic.co.uk ; oxfordwine.co.uk ) Another reason why I object to giving port a seasonal monopoly is that there are so many other wonderful fortified wines around that are capable of playing the same cheeseboard-accompanying or mellow evening-sipping roles. That other great Portuguese fortified, Madeira, for example, is an ideal alternative to cognac, whisky and rum, and, a bottling such as the Christmas cake-rich but zesty Henriques & Henriques 5YO Single Vineyard Verdelho, Madeira NV (£19, oxfordwine.co.uk ) comes with the added benefit of clocking in at less than half the alcohol of your favourite brown spirit. Much the same can be said of age-dated sherries, such as the magnificently, portentously named Matusalem from Gonzalez Byass, the makers of the always-excellent, light dry fino sherry, Tio Pepe. As an aged oloroso style, it has none of that Marmitey yeasty hit you get from fino and manzanilla, offering instead a gliding, sweetly satisfying hit of figs, dates, and chocolate orange.

Japanese grill fans will love Hachi in Soho, especially those rich enough to indulge in the wagyu beef offering

Hachi Japanese BBQ, 56 Brewer Street, London W1F 9TJ. Starters and sides £5.80-£11.20, grill platters £7.80-£139.70, desserts £3.20, beer from £5.60, sake from £11.80 a glass

For a restaurant where it’s possible to spend significant amounts of money, Hachi, in London’s Soho, doesn’t look like much. It has a narrow exterior of black brick. There is something eager about the window display: multiple menus, some with pictures of food; a shelf with emptied bottles of Japanese liquor, as if to say that good times have been had here. For a while there was a TV screen in the window showing cuts of beef and later a chiller cabinet, filled with slabs of animal. The small dining room doesn’t look like much either: walls clad in fake brick and hung with cartoony images of animals indicating their various cuts; wide black tables inset with grills; a semi-open kitchen.

In some ways it’s not really about the chewing, Philippa Perry suggests

The question My wife’s eating habits drive me crazy. What can I do? We’ve been married for 30 years and we are a good team together. But she doesn’t seem able to eat with her mouth closed. Sitting beside me even now, she’s noisily crunch ing her way through a bunch of cheese crackers and an apple. When we’re out with friends, she’s by far the noisiest eater at the table.

I love her energy, strength and, if it’s not a mealtime, her presence, but we’re eating together more as we head into retirement and I find it difficult to stay in the room with her.

The row over Labour’s cuts to pensioners’ energy payments is about to flare up again after damning new research

The row over the government’s decision to slash winter fuel payments is set to be reignited after new evidence revealed that more than 1 million older people are skipping meals because of financial concerns.

The fresh study also suggested that millions are already cutting down on their heating, with warnings about the impact on the NHS. A spike in applications for pension credit , which enables people to receive the winter fuel payments, also means that even some of those who qualify are having to wait up to 12 weeks to receive it because Whitehall has been “overwhelmed” with claims, the Observer has been told.

The Christmas bird has now been financially weaponised

I’m calling this column “Turkey, Revisited”, after “Toads, Revisited” by Philip Larkin, a poet who was most definitely not a gourmand (“I was too lazy to buy rations in London, so today has been a poached egg, macaroni & tinned spinach”). Some years ago, you see, I wrote about my dislike of the bird in one of these columns, a piece that continues occasionally to reverberate in the form of messages from readers. Riffing on an essay by the great American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten , who once tried a legendary turkey recipe whose stuffing has 32 ingredients, the piece in question detailed my adventures with a Kelly Bronze I’d mortgaged my house to buy: the baroque trumpets that played as it entered the kitchen; the spa treatments I administered to its skin; the tea towel of finest cashmere that covered it before it was carved. It also came to the conclusion that, in spite of all of the above, I had completely wasted my time. The result was … about 3kg of OK.

So why return to the subject? No, I haven’t seen the light. In fact, my aversion has since become close to outright loathing. In part, this has to do with my nature. I seem to have made up my mind about turkey, in the same way that I’ve made up my mind about Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg (this lady is not for turning, unless we’re talking about a spit with a nice bit of pork or lamb on it). I think also that I’ve grown more green down the years, and turkey is almost inevitably wasteful, no matter how many recipes for leftover korma one dutifully reads.

The chef, author and broadcaster on the secret to plant-based cooking, what to eat – and how to name your livestock

At home, we had a brilliant book called The Times Cookery Book by Katie Stewart. It must have come out in the early 1970s and I basically became the pastry chef for my mum’s dinner parties. I made chocolate mousses, chocolate rum gateaux, profiteroles, eclairs and genoise sponge in the summer with three, or even four, layers of cream, raspberries and cake. But it wasn’t Bake Off : I didn’t try and make it look like Vesuvius or something.

I learned early on that it’s not a brilliant idea to name all the animals you’re planning to eat. On the whole you name the breeding stock but not the fat stock; so the sows and the nannies and the cows have names, but not the ones who are passing through, you might say, a little faster. I did call my first two pigs Charlie and Tom, after two of my best friends, and it didn’t make it any easier to take them to the slaughterhouse.

Roll your eyes all you like at restaurants’ Christmas prices, but remember there are people giving up their day to cook for you

At Grantley Hall, a rural Yorkshire hotel so fancy they pipe jazz around the car park, there are various food offerings this Christmas Day. One of them, from the much-admired chef Shaun Rankin, is entitled the Taste of Home menu. It’s an interesting title, because it acknowledges something: that despite our growing comfort with paying others to cook for us, choosing to eat out on 25 December is still regarded as subversive and decadent. Christmas dinner is the one remaining domestic feast. It’s the one day of the year when we strap ourselves to the stove and cook a complex multistage meal, packed full of adored convention and cliche. And yet amazingly, some people choose to get out the credit card and leave the house.

So what is Rankin’s taste of home? It starts with sourdough, cultured butters and beef tea, continues through “scallop, celeriac, pine”, and ends with a tarte tatin and mince pies. In between, there’s the comforting sound of “traditional roast Norfolk Bronze turkey”, though as the butter is clearly more cultured than I am and the scallop comes with pine, who knows what that means. If you want to taste Mr Rankin’s home it will cost you £275 a head. Roll your eyes all you like, but remember there are people giving up their Christmas Day to cook this. It should cost.

Marmalade sharpens the dried fruit flavours, while a crown of almonds makes this a bake fit for a queen

I never considered myself a fruitcake person until I met Dundee cake. And I’d never thought that adding more fruit, in the form of marmalade, to an already very fruity cake would be the thing that would have me coming back just to “tidy the edges”. Legend has it that Mary, Queen of Scots did not like glacé cherries, so the Dundee cake, topped with blanched almonds instead, was created especially for her. I agree with her on the almonds, and with another queen, Marie Antoinette, on her immortal words, which seem very fitting for Christmas: “Let them eat (Dundee) cake.”

Scrummy little chocolate sandwich biscuits for gifting or taking to a festive get-together

I used to think that homemade food gifts were a bit showoffy. At a time when most of us are frantically writing to-do lists and just trying to hold it all together, anyone who had the time to make presents only made the rest of us feel bad. Nowadays, though, I think homemade food gifts are the most brilliant and wonderful things. The time invested is really not that much to write home (or even to Santa) about, and we all need less “stuff”, right? Sugar and kisses, made from the comfort of home: how could a present be more perfect?