Why not try the taste of tradition this Christmas

With more and more people becoming interested in the origins of our food, Christmas is the perfect time to learn from the past, writes food historian Regina Sexton.

I had no idea what a melon baller was until 1989. For Christmas that year, Darina Allen brought to the world her Christmas dinner starter, grape and melon with mint. Her television programme, A Simply Delicious Irish Christmas (with the book of the same name) showed us how to make it.

In thousands of homes on thousands of TVs, Darina peeled no end of grapes and balled up on end of little melon globes. We were hooked and in more ways than one: hooked on the lovely strangeness of the orangey mint syrup for the dinky melons and grapes and hooked on the idea that this needed special tools — a melon baller and a paper clip pulled apart and re-shaped into a hook, for hooking out the grape seeds.