Tom Parker Bowles on his latest cookbook

Tom Parker Bowles’ most recent cookbook, Fortnum & Mason: Christmas and Other Winter Feasts, was released in the UK last fall but only recently made it to US bookstores. Parker Bowles, who writes a weekly column for The Mail on Sunday and is Food Editor for Esquire, recently sat down with Town & Country Magazine to talk about his latest book and reveal his own Christmas food memories.

When asked about his preference for the Christmas meal, Parker Bowles confessed that he is not a fan of turkey saying “most people have turkey and there are very good turkeys, but give me beef any day.” He also thinks that the turkey (or even the beef) isn’t the best part about the meal anyway. He believes that “the best thing about Christmas is not the main bit, it’s the bits around it. So you have chipolatas, which are small sausages wrapped in bacon. You have Brussels sprouts. Basically the turkey is just the ballast, really, to put everything out around it.”

In addition to explaining more about Fortnum & Mason: Christmas & Other Winter Feasts, Parker Bowles talks about how food brings people together, which segues into a discussion about how he came into food writing as a career. After a joking statement of “I was really shit at every job I did after university and was fired most of the time,” he confesses that it was that he likes the language of food and he loves chefs. Plus, as he states, you can still have “a five-hour lunch, in a world where five-hour lunches don’t exist anymore.”