This Christmas, will I finally find a way to stop my gluttony getting the better of me?

Delighted by a description of Agatha Christie’s childhood Christmas dinner, Will Gore would murder for an extra pig in a blanket

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The introduction to a book I picked up for the first time this week combines two of my favourite things: Agatha Christie, and Christmas dinner.

Midwinter Murder is a collection of the detective writer’s short stories, all with a wintry theme, and several of course set at Christmas. By way of a prologue, the collection begins with an autobiographical account of Christie’s own childhood Christmases, which after her father’s death in 1901 were spent in Cheshire, with the extended family of her sister’s husband, James Watts.

Christmas Day at the Victorian Gothic Abney Hall, was evidently a gluttonous affair. Lunch was served at two o’clock, after church and presents had been ticked off, and began with oyster soup, followed by turbot. Next came the main course, consisting of boiled turkey, roast turkey and a large roast sirloin of beef. Adults at the table generally confined themselves to just one meat, but Christie recounts how she, a slight girl of 12 or 13, began with the roast turkey, then moved onto the boiled version, before finishing with “four or five slashing slices of sirloin”.