Take five: Festive food swaps to cater for all tastes

Think outside the box for local, healthier, and dietary-specific festive food options

Sligo Oyster Experience has launched two flavours of Pickled Sligo Oysters

“Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.”

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843, set down a seasonal food template for the ages, gathering the Cratchit family around the hearth for their sage and onion-stuffed goose, a pudding “like a speckled cannon-ball”, apples, oranges, and “a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire”.