Christmas nowadays is all about shopping, feasting and partying, usually followed by January doom and gloom when we feel fat, broke and worn out. It’s quite the opposite of the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas, long celebrated in Britain during the Christian Feast of Epiphany running from 25 December through to 6 January. This was a particularly welcome celebration after the long and dull period of fasting during Advent, when no animal products could be eaten. As Annie Gray says in At Christmas We Feast, it was “24 days of fish, vegetables and almond milk.” Must have been hard going.

The song Twelve Days of Christmas was first printed in a children’s book in the 1780s and is thought to have originated as a memory and forfeit game. It mentions six birds that were eaten at the time: partridge, turtle doves, French hens, calling or colly birds (blackbirds), geese and swans. Even the “five gold rings” could refer to ringed pheasants or “goldspink” (goldfinches). However, this festive diet was soon to change, since according to English Heritage’s A Taste of History, the late eighteenth century was a time when “farm animals began to replace wild in the nation’s diet, especially as game became more and more the prerogative of the landowner through enclosures and severe game laws.”

The English had long been “great flesh eaters”, renowned for their love of meat, as Henri de Valbourg Misson noted in his travel memoirs. “Middling” social types would eat meat every day, he wrote in 1719, while wealthier households would enjoy two meat dishes at meals: “a leg of roast or boil’d mutton… fowls, pigs, ox tripes, and tongues, rabbits, pidgeons, all well moisten’d with butter.”

The fashion for stuffing birds within birds, like Russian dolls, dates back to Roman times and is known variously as engastration, turducken or rôti sans pareil (seventeen birds). Typically, a turkey would be stuffed with a goose, then a chicken, duck, and pheasant, ending with a partridge at the centre. Another culinary jape, popular in Tudor times, was combining animals: the Cockentrice was a suckling pig sewn onto the bottom half of a turkey; it was basted with saffron and egg yolk as it cooked, and finally gilded with gold leaf, becoming the table centrepiece.

Luckily the traditional Inuit dish of Kiviak never caught on here, in which hundreds of whole auks (small seabirds) are sewn inside a seal skin. This is buried under rocks and left for three months to ferment, before being eaten during the Artic winter. The death of Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen in 1933, (a Greenlandic–Danish polar explorer and anthropologist) was attributed to food poisoning by Kiviak – can’t say I’m surprised.

Goose took centre stage in Victorian Christmases, when, according to Simon Callow’s Charles Dickens and the Victorian Christmas Feast, even the poorest families could afford a bird by paying weekly into a Goose Club, invariably being cheated along the way. The Temperance Movement took aim at these clubs, which were often like pubs and lured their members into spending their nugatory salaries on the demon drink. My father might have had a festive pre-prandial when he once accused my mother of unknowingly cooking a goose, for there was “barely any meat on it” he said, and how were we going to feed twelve? At which my mother deftly righted the bird and our Christmas turkey was revealed in all its glory.

Eating swans is now considered a medieval throwback, but according to Annie Gray The Times carried adverts for “dressed cygnets” for dinners and banquets as late as 1931. These days, luckily for goldfinches, turtle doves and blackbirds, Brits would rather watch them feasting at the bird table than munch on them at the buffet table.

It all makes roast turkey sound very dull, even though for many of us it’s the focal point of Christmas Day, sitting resplendent on a platter surrounded by dishes groaning with food. Well, that’s what we thought when I worked at Good Housekeeping. Unfortunately, we had to prepare articles six months ahead, which meant the Christmas feast was photographed on the hottest day in July. I can’t say it was a joy to be standing over steaming vats of sprouts or sizzling roast potatoes. Fortunately, the turkey only had to be half-cooked to keep it nice and plump; it was then generously brushed with wood stain to give that perfect bronze glaze. Happy Christmas!

Devils on Horseback

If you’re feasting on a bird this year, please make some of these to go alongside, or as an easy canapé to go with a glass of fizz.

24 quality prunes
24 blanched whole almonds
extra virgin olive oil
12 rashers of higher-welfare smoked streaky bacon

Make a small an incision in the prunes. Season the almonds with sea salt and drizzle with oil, then stuff inside the prunes. Halve the rashers of bacon across the middle, then wrap each prune in a piece. Place the devils on a lined baking tray and chill for 15min. Cook at 190ºC for 15 to 20 minutes, or until bacon is crisp. Serve immediately with some cocktail sticks and a small bowl of mustard mayonnaise to dip them into.

Lydia Brownlow was a cookery editor at Good Housekeeping Magazine and a contributor to The Daily Beast. Latterly she has been inspiring children to cook. More info at lydiabrownlow.com