How to build the ultimate festive charcuterie board
Elli Jacobs
Photo: Natalia Van Doninck
A charcuterie board is essentially a culinary choose-your-own-adventure story. It s made up of an assortment of cold, cooked and cured meats, and supported by a selection of cheeses, dips, spreads, tangy pickles, crackers and fresh fruit and vegetables, all perfectly arranged on a board or platter.
Originating from the French
chair ( flesh ) and
cuit ( cooked ), and pronounced shar-coo-tur-ree , the dish originated hundreds of years ago in Europe as a mezze of cured meats that highlighted traditional forms of meat preservation and flavour enhancement.
Nicola Romano, the Italian-born head chef at Melbourne restaurant Oster, says that for Italians, a charcuterie board will appear at the table without fail when friends or family get together.
STOCKING FILLERS
Dieting tip of the year comes from Jilly Cooper: ‘Paste photographs of girls in bikinis on all the biscuit tins.’
Other highlights in Between The Covers (Penguin, £14.99), a collection of Cooper’s newspaper columns from the 1970s, include how to deal with Christmas cards ‘I cover every available piece of furniture with ours; it is such a marvellous excuse not to dust for a month’ and the tale of her red scarf accidentally finding its way into the wash: her husband was the only member of his rugby team to have a rose-pink jockstrap.
The Get Your Teenage Boy Reading award goes (as usual) to the QI Elves, with Funny You Should Ask. (Faber, £12.99). This year’s facts include the size of Armenian Scrabble boards (17 squares x 17, rather than 15 x 15, because the language’s words are so long), and the explanation for women’s buttons being on the left it’s from the era when rich ladies had maids to help them dress (rich gentlemen did it alone,