Tolerating Christmas

Are you one of the lucky ones? Can you sink your teeth into a fruity, boozy plum pudding with impunity? And have you ever found a plum in there? (I actually want to know the answer to that one!)

The ghosts of Christmas repasts can truly haunt people who are allergic or intolerant to certain foods. The most common culprits are eggs, wheat, dairy and sugar. Not only can they be found lurking in Grandma’s Christmas cake; they frequently skulk in her sage and onion stuffing and luscious red wine gravy too. Baddies!

What can you do to protect yourself?

Let’s talk about the sweet stuff first and how to stop it turning sour on you. If you make puddings, cakes and pies from scratch, the best place to start is with a cookbook written specially for people with food allergies. The cookery section of a good bookshop should carry a range of titles dealing with your specific issue: e.g. dairy-free cooking, baking without sugar, gluten-free cooking for people with coeliac disease, etc. (1) I’d also suggest using organically grown ingredients. Chemicals add to the burden of toxicity in the body and may make allergies worse.

The second step is to use the right ingredients, which means replacing ordinary eggs, wheat flour, dairy milk and sugar with alternatives. Just be aware that substitutes can change the taste, texture and cooking time of a dish. They may add or subtract moisture (especially in the case of liquid sweeteners or drier flours such as spelt) or respond differently to heat, so it’s a good idea, until you get a feel for what you’re doing, to follow a recipe.

Now, eggs! Check out http://www.vegansociety.com/food/cateri … ggfree.php for manifold ideas for egg-free cooking. The Hopsack sells a powdered egg replacement product for baking, in addition to arrowroot, tofu and other egg substitutes. If you pop in, staff will be happy to help you.

Spelt flour is an excellent substitute for wheat flour if you are simply intolerant to wheat but it is of no use if you are coeliac, as it contains gluten. For gluten-free baking, buckwheat, millet, rice, quinoa, tapioca, potato and chestnut flour are the way to go. Be a little wary of quinoa and millet flour, though, as they can taste bitter.

Milk substitutes include soya milk, nut milks (e.g. almond milk), oat milk and rice milk. Check the packet for sweeteners and additional ingredients. Organic is preferable but in the case of soya milk, it’s essential. Organic soya products are guaranteed free from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) but non-organic soya products are not. I find oat milk the most neutral substitute. Unlike rice milk, it is not naturally sweet and unlike soya milk, there’s no risk of curdling when it’s heated. It does thicken, though, so bear that in mind when using it in cooking.

Useful alternatives to sugar include the following: honey, molasses (a treacle-like by-product of sugar refining that contains the vitamins and minerals stripped from white sugar), apple concentrate, agave syrup, maple syrup, brown rice syrup, barley/corn syrup and xylitol. Most of the above contain some form of fructose and can be used in yeast-based baking. (Dates and other dried fruit also add sweetness to a dish.) On the whole, they are not suitable for diabetics.

Xylitol is an exception. It is an alcohol-based sweetener derived from birch or corn but it is naturally present in many fruits. It’s a white, crystalline substance and is interchangeable with sugar for most cooking projects. You can bake with it but it won’t work if you are baking bread or anything containing yeast, as yeast can’t metabolise it. Furthermore, it doesn’t crystallise as much as sugar, so it’s not good for making nut brittle or hard sweets. On the upside, it appears to be more suitable for diabetics than other sugar substitutes and it is definitely kinder to teeth. On the downside, it can have a laxative effect and is lethally toxic to dogs, so DO NOT feed your hound anything made with xylitol if you want him or her to see the other side of Christmas. Be good, Roxy, or else…! (2)(3)

If making your own treats is too much hassle, you could try out the Village Bakery’s range of organic puddings, cakes and mince pies. The Hopsack carries two ranges of Village Bakery products and one is gluten-free.

Now for the savoury stuff. The same rules apply: a cookbook for allergy-free cooking is an excellent first step. Stuffing and sauces are traditional repositories for wheat and dairy products, so using spelt or gluten-free breadcrumbs for stuffing and an alternative flour (or ground almonds) for thickening gravies and sauces are good ways to go. (Don’t use quinoa bread to make breadcrumbs, though, as it has a distinctively bitter taste.) Again, sauces can be made using milk substitutes (unsweetened soya or oat milk in preference to the sweeter rice or nut milks) and a sugar substitute can be used to make cranberry sauce.

News flash! Cornucopia restaurant on Wicklow Street has finally produced a cookery book (4). I was having a peek at it this afternoon and it is bursting with taste-tingling recipes for vegetarians and vegans. The beauty of this book is that it details whether a recipe is vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, etc. Many of the recipes could be used as alternative Christmas dinners or side dishes. I particularly love their stuffed portobello mushrooms with blue cheese and walnuts, served on leek mashed potatoes and drizzled with onion gravy. (It’s not a gluten-free or vegan recipe but could easily be made so.) Cornucopia seems to trot this treat out at Christmas time and I really think it would make a mouth-watering alternative to the traditional bird. Anything involving chestnuts, mushrooms, leeks, garlic, onions and red wine and winter herbs such as sage and thyme turns on my Christmas lights, I have to say. Maybe I won’t bother with tradition this year after all!

(1) The Hopsack also carries a small range of books on allergy-free cooking.
(2) All ingredients available from The Hopsack.
(3) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylitol for more information on xylitol.
(4) ‘Cornucopia at home’ is available from all good bookshops and from Cornucopia Restaurant on Wicklow Street.
Last edited by Rhoda-Mary on Mon Dec 15, 2008 6:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Rhoda-Mary

Posts: 33
Joined: Tue Feb 12, 2008 2:29 pm

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Re: Tolerating Christmas

Postby Finn Murray on Sun Dec 14, 2008 11:03 am
Just a quick note to tell all to check out a great gluten-free cook’s website http://daveurde1.spaces.live.com/. He’s constantly experimenting with the gluten-free paradigm, and has lots of advice to offer new initiaties.

F

Finn Murray

Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Dec 07, 2007 10:12 pm

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Re: Tolerating Christmas

Postby Rhoda-Mary on Mon Dec 15, 2008 7:04 pm
All I can say to that is yum! There are loads of recipes on Dave’s site that would appeal to non-coeliacs too. Lots of information on gluten/coeliac issues as well.

R-M