Interview with Julia Georgallis | How To Eat Your Christmas Tree
By: Suzy Chase
Tags: Cookbooks, Cooking, Christmas, Podcast, Trees

Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase, he’s just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Julia Georgallis: I’m Julia Georgallis and I’m the author of How To Eat Your Christmas Tree cookbook.

Suzy Chase: There is this BBC One documentary that was released in 2017, I believe, called Judi Dench. My Passion For Trees, and I saw an excerpt and she has such reverence for trees. It’s so easy to take trees for granted, but Dame Judy discusses how she touches her trees she talks to her trees, she loves her trees on her six acre property. Her lifelong fascination with trees started when she was little. When did you get interested in trees?

Julia Georgallis: I’ve always been really interested in nature and I’ve always really loved plants and taking care of plants and I’m also really interested in edible plants like foraging and keeping herbs. So I recently moved back home with my mum in September and I brought with me a sourdough starter. I brought with me my kombucha, and then I brought about 20 plants home with me. So it really started in a big way when I left home, but it’s kind of just got progressively more and more as I’ve gotten older, really.

Suzy Chase: First when I saw the title of this cookbook. I was like, what? But then after I started reading it, you made me think about things I’ve never thought of, like 40 million trees are cut down per year at Christmas time. That is an astounding number and I’ve never looked at it as wasteful. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Julia Georgallis: I think it’s not just about Christmas trees. I think we do kind of waste a lot of things, especially around Christmas. Christmas is a particularly wasteful time of year. And this book is it’s, you know, obviously the title is How To Eat Your Christmas Tree so it’s very much about Christmas trees, but it’s also about thinking about how we waste things in general and how we could reuse things and look at things in a different ways, including the plants that we keep and the food that we eat.

Suzy Chase: I’d love some tips on how to have a more sustainable Christmas.

Julia Georgallis: There’s actually quite a lot of things you can do. And funnily enough, when I started this project in 2015, having a sustainable Christmas, wasn’t really something that people were really discussing, but now there are so many things you can do. So for example, you could cut down on your meat intake. I’m not saying that you forego the Turkey completely, if you really, really want to eat Turkey on Christmas day, fine, but you know have you ever thought about maybe not eating so much meat in the run-up till Christmas? There’s also things like ditching Christmas wrap and maybe not sending Christmas cards, which maybe people don’t really do anymore anyway, but those things really, really are quite wasteful. I’ve also got a recipe in my book for edible Christmas decorations because Christmas tree decorations are so, so wasteful, including Christmas tree lights they’re really, really unsustainable, just the way they’re made and also the fact that they run on quite a lot of energy. There’s quite a few little things that you can do to make your Christmas a little bit more sustainable overall.

Suzy Chase: So what’s one edible Christmas tree decoration we could do. Off the top of your head.

Julia Georgallis: Well, you could do things like gingerbread cookies cause they obviously they keep for a long time so they would, they would last really nicely on your tree. But then in the book I’ve also got some edible Christmas tree decorations, which can also be eaten by birds if you want to have your tree outdoors, if you have the room or if you have a garden and those are basically seed balls. So you could make seed balls, energy balls, that kind of stuff.

Suzy Chase: Can you talk a bit about how cultures around the world see evergreens?

Julia Georgallis: Yeah. So this is something that I really enjoyed writing about actually in the How To Eat Your Christmas Tree book, because I haven’t just focused on the kind of standard Western Christmas trees like pine, fir and spruce. And I’ve also looked at things like bamboo, which is very, very surprising to a lot of people because in the East, in Korea and Japan in China, the pine, the plum and the bamboo are kind of known as the three friends of winter and these three plants are seen in a very similar way to how we see pine, fir, and spruce. So they’re symbols of longevity, they’re really plucky, they’re really hardy plants and then also I’ve written a lot about Juniper, which is a cousin of, of pine and the fir and the spruce and that again is quite a plucky plant. And then there’s also the olive, which I refer to as the OG Christmas tree, because the Romans and the Greeks used to decorate their houses around winter time with olive branches, because olives are also symbols of everlasting life.

Suzy Chase: Can you describe the flavor profiles of fir, spruce and pine?

Julia Georgallis: Oh, uh they’re delicious. So I’ll start with spruce because that’s my favorite tree to eat. So it’s, it’s really kind of in a way of vanilla-y and I actually recently discovered because I was always a bit baffled as to why my spruce ice cream tasted of vanilla and I actually recently found out that kind of artificially produced vanilla used to have notes of spruce in it as well. So that’s the kind of flavor profile that we’re dealing with with spruce. And then fir is a little bit more zesty it’s a bit more grassy and pine is much, much more delicate than the other two. So pine is, it’s very delicate it’s quite woody.

Suzy Chase: Ya know, it’s funny because when I think of pine as a flavor, I think of Pine-Sol the cleaner, do you guys have Pine-Sol?

Julia Georgallis: Yeah. And that’s the thing that people really think about because they, they always associate pine with like the Christmas tree shaped car smell things that you put on your dashboard.

Suzy Chase: And it’s such an invasive smell! So it was interesting that you said that pine is a little softer.

Julia Georgallis Yeah. Pine is the softest out of the three, like when you boil up the needles, because initially when we first started this project, that was the first thing that I did I boiled up the needles to see what they tasted like and pine doesn’t really taste of much when you boil it up, unless you add kind of other things to it. But yeah, I was surprised as well, really.

Suzy Chase: So I guess the pine smell is made up.

Julia Georgallis: It does smell quite different to how it tastes. And I don’t know why, because in a forest it kind of smells a lot more expansive, you know.

Suzy Chase: Can we tell if a tree is poisonous to eat?

Julia Georgallis: No you can’t, but yew’s which kind of look a little bit like pines are poisonous so just make sure you’re not eating a yew tree. And the other thing is a lot of people will buy trees that haven’t been grown in an environment, which means that you can eat them. So quite a lot of trees are sprayed with things, with paint, with all kinds of chemicals so just make sure that if you are buying your tree and you plan to eat it, that you buy it from somewhere that sells organic and nicely treated trees.

Suzy Chase: Can you talk about page 126 for a minute, about how we do seek out an edible Christmas tree?

Julia Georgallis: Buying an edible Christmas tree it’s a little bit like how you are encouraged to buy your food you know, it’s like buying an organic Apple for example, or, or something that’s been grown in a nice way without lots of pesticides. So in my book, I do have a little section in the back as to where you can buy edible Christmas trees around the world. In the States, you can buy your Christmas trees from the National Christmas Tree Association RealChristmasTrees.org. There’s different organizations around the world which are doing really nice things with buying edible Christmas trees. So in Portugal, you can rent your trees from the country’s fire service. And they’re all kind of nicely grown trees, which I thought was really lovely.

Suzy Chase: So you can rent your tree in Portugal?

Julia Georgallis: You can rent your tree yeah and you can. You can rent it. They are nicely grown in forests. And then once you’re done with it, then the fire service will come and take it away for you dispose of it nicely.

Suzy Chase: Then cue the post-Christmas world, where as you put it, it’s nothing like the pre-Christmas world everything is glum we’re fatter we’re poorer, and we’re still a bit hung over. We must repent for all the fun we’ve had and to top it off the mass, throwing away of millions of little trees, commences. What are the five ways to recycle our Christmas tree?

Julia Georgallis: So the five ways to reuse your Christmas tree, you can recycle it if you contact your council and check with them, how it’s best to recycle your tree. You can also contact your nearest Christmas tree farm for example. Make friends with your local Christmas tree farmer. Where I buy my Christmas trees from to eat they turn their Christmas trees into kind of like horse jumps and all kinds of things, which is quite nice. You can donate your tree to a local zoo or a safari park or any park in your area. I mean, I think the really nice thing to do with your tree is to, if you can, repot it and replant it, and then you can have a tree for next year, it’s, it’s almost like you’re growing a tree that will kind of live alongside you. You can also dry the branches and use them as decorations or make a dried wreath for next year or I would really love to see more people talking to their local florists and see if the florists can do something with some nice pieces of pine and fir and spruce.

Suzy Chase: Christmas tree vinegar is by far the easiest way to reuse your tree. Can you describe this recipe? That’s on page 45 and this also makes a great gift.

Julia Georgallis: Oh yeah. I love this recipe. It is super, super easy. So all you need is a couple of large kilner jars or a mason jar. You will also need about two liters of good quality side of vinegar and roughly 200 grams of fir, pine or spruce and you’ll take the needles from your, fir, pine or spruce you will sterilize your glass jar, and then once your glass jar is sterilizing, you’ll prepare and finely chop the needles. So there’s also a little section in the beginning of my book for how to prepare the needles properly, but it’s really easy you basically just snip them off the brunch. And then once your glass jar is sterilized you’ll pour the vinegar into large sauce pan heat over a medium heat until it’s warm, but not, not quite boiling and then add all the chopped needles to the jar and pour the vinegar over that. Once that’s all in the jar, you’ll tightly seal your jar and leave it to infuse for at least two weeks, but you can infuse it for up to three months. And so obviously if you leave it for three months, it will be stronger. And you’ll kind of know when your vinegars infused because all the needles sink slowly to the bottom of the jar. So once it’s infused, you’ll use a fine sieve to strain out all the needles and pour the strained vinegar into a new sterilized jar. And then once you’ve actually made this infused vinegar, it lasts for ages. It can last until next Christmas. So you could potentially make all your vinegar in January for next Christmas and I think that’s a lovely, lovely, festive gift.

Suzy Chase: Ash is used in cooking all over the world. As home cooks how can we use it?

Julia Georgallis: It’s much easier to use ash than even I actually thought it was. You basically char your branches. I mean, in this case, Christmas trees, but I guess you could use other types of tree as well. So you put your branches inside your oven, turn your oven up until your branches turned black, essentially. And then you blitz your branches with a hand whisk and then you have ash to use in delicious ways. I’ve got some recipes in my book for the Burnt Ash Cauliflower, there’s Ash Baked Vegetables, Ash Honey Glaze, which I really, really love that’s really, really simple to use and you can use that on meat or fish or vegetables, or even pastries actually. You can kind of do lots of different things with it and it gives this really lovely, smoky, quite expansive flavor. You can really taste the kind of pine and the spruce and the fir in the ash. Yea ash is much easier to cook with than I even imagined, to be honest with you.

Suzy Chase: So you wrote in the scent of pine essay, which I love by the way you wrote “On a metaphysical level, the forest humbles us, gives us perspective and sparks creativity, making appearances in every creative pursuit of man poems, literature, folklore, religion, and belief systems, art, music, and dance as a place of magic and deep contemplation and an enabler of ritual.” What is the most powerful magic that trees have?

Julia Georgallis: Yeah, it’s the smell, isn’t it? It’s the smell of a forest. The fact that it can transport you backwards in time and that’s quite powerful, isn’t it? I suppose, because there’s so many different memories that, that sparks for me anyway. And I think for a lot of people, you know, what I really love about my own memories of pine is that they’re at different parts of my life and they’re in all parts of the world. And they’re also at all times of year, like pine forest in the summer in Sweden, you know? And so it’s this lovely kind of amalgamation of all different, lovely memories. It’s great.

Suzy Chase: Pine for me kind of evokes kind of like a romantic loneliness. I grew up in Kansas and it’s flat and to me, the flatness is super comforting but then when I get into a forest, it hits me as very lonely. Isn’t that weird?

Julia Georgallis: Yeah you know, that’s the opposite of what I think of them as. You know my first memory of pine is we have some land in Cyprus where my family are from, and my first memory of pine is going and sitting under the pines in the summer and everyone goes and sort of drinks their coffee and plays cards and things and it’s kind of very sociable. And, you know, I imagine kind of pine forest by the sea in Sweden, where everyone’s kind of running around and going to the beach. So it’s kind of the opposite of your memories actually, which is really nice,

Suzy Chase: But mine is kind of like a romantic loneliness.

Julia Georgallis: Yea like a comforting loneliness.

Suzy Chase: I made your recipe for Pine Nut and Chocolate Brownies on page 94. Can you describe this recipe?

Julia Georgallis: That’s a funny recipe actually, because I think a lot of people don’t put two and two together that pine nuts are from a Christmas tree.

Suzy Chase: I know! Last night my husband and I were talking about it I said, Bob, have you ever made the connection of pine nuts to pine trees? And I thought, he’d be like, yeah, it doesn’t everyone. And he was like, no.

Julia Georgallis: No one does. it’s so funny. That’s why I love this recipe so much because it kind of draws people attention to the fact that Christmas tree is a part of our lives all year round. But this, I mean, I love this recipe it’s based on an Italian dessert called, Torta al cioccolato con pignoli. And I love the fact that the combination of the oils in pine nut kind of make this brownie really, really fudgy and very creamy because pine nuts are quite creamy, so super easy to make. So you just need kind of a lovely dark chocolate, and handful of pine nuts. And you end up with this really gooey brownie. It’s great.

Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called Last Night’s Dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.

Julia Georgallis: Oh, so last night, well, I’ll start with what I had for lunch because it feeds into last night’s dinner, but I had a plate of mussels for lunch in butter and garlic and coriander. And I kept the kind of juice from the muscles that I made for lunch, and I warmed up some rice in it so it was kind of like fishy and garlicky rice and then I made a kind of soy sauce formula with spring onions, chop that up put that in the rice and use half an avocado and lemon and a little bit of sesame oil. So I had egg fried rice basically with some leftovers.

Suzy Chase: Yum. That sounds amazing. Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Julia Georgallis: So you can find information about my work on JuliaGeorgallis.co.uk. And I’m also on Instagram, which is @JuliaGeorgallis. I am actually launching a new project for all of my food research to sit on. And that’s also on Instagram, it’s called @TheEdibleArchive so it’s TheEdibleArchive.org and that will be launching in January.

Suzy Chase: Well, this has been eye opening. Thanks Julia, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast and Merry Christmas to you.

Julia Georgallis: Merry Christmas, Suzy. Thank you so much for inviting. I really, really like your podcast.

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