Saturday, November 29, 2025 |
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'Tis the season to eat an entire roast dinner between two slices of bread, apparently. Our lead this week is a love letter-slash-intervention for the runaway festive sarnie economy, in which we ask why Britain loses its mind every November over structurally unsound £7 lunches. From Yorkshire pudding wraps drenched in gravy mayo to Leon's £7.99 Veggie Twistmas and that texturally chaotic Pret porchetta, we dissect the physics of cold turkey, the postcode lottery of quality and why your chosen Christmas sandwich is basically a personality test. If you've ever tried to eat a Tesco Yorkshire pud wrap on a moving train, this one's for you.
From overcomplicated sandwiches to overexposed stout, we're also looking at the cost-of-drinking crisis through the frothy head of a Guinness. Once the preserve of "old man" pubs, Guinness is now the most photographed pint in Britain – the TikTok holy grail, the black-and-cream matcha of the bar. But Gen Z's performative love affair has helped push prices up, squeezed pub margins and invited a challenger in the form of Murphy's, the cheaper Irish stout quietly muscling onto taps. Between £8 pints, a nationwide shortage and the rise of the 60/40 low-alcohol pour, this is less a simple stout war, more a story about what happens when a drink becomes social currency in a cost-of-living crisis.
If you thought your coffee order was safe, think again. With prepackaged milkshakes and lattes now dragged into the sugar-tax crosshairs, Lydia Spencer-Elliott confronts her own "iced white chocolate matcha latte with oat milk" habit and asks whether our dessert-in-a-cup culture has finally jumped the shark. With nutritionist Rob Hobson on hand to decode what's actually in those ready-to-drink iced coffees – and how little they fill you up compared with the calories they deliver – she looks at why the government is coming for our milky treats and why your best bet might be an unsexy, two-calorie Americano.
Back in the kitchen, we're leaning into proper comfort. Mike Reid of the new Liverpool St Chop House shares four recipes that bottle the current London mood for heritage cooking: a roast chicken pie with a shatteringly golden lid, nostalgic chicken kiev with creamed spinach, sticky date pudding and a steamed spotted dick drenched in rum-soaked raisins and custard. These are the kind of rib-sticking dishes that make central heating feel optional.
For something a little more practical (but no less comforting), this month's Budget Bites is all about batch cooking you actually want to eat. Think veggie three-bean chilli, pizza meatball traybake, slow-roast ratatouille, mushroom stroganoff, tadka daal and a Moroccan chickpea stew – big-flavour, freezer-friendly dinners designed to turn one Sunday afternoon into a week's worth of "oh thank God there's something in the fridge".
We also have one of the most moving pieces you'll read this season: Ella Walker's interview with Dr Clare Bailey Mosley on how cooking helped her navigate grief after the death of her husband, Michael Mosley. From the chorizo omelette he perfected to the salmon traybake and Persian love cake in her new book, she talks about food as a way to stay resilient, keep family close and carry on Michael's work on metabolic health, even on days when boiling an egg felt impossible.
And finally, we say goodbye to Skye Gyngell, the Australian-born chef who quietly redefined modern British cooking long before "farm-to-table" became a hashtag. From Petersham Nurseries to Spring and Heckfield Place, her food was always about deep respect for ingredients rather than fuss, a philosophy that shaped a generation of chefs and growers. In our tribute, we look back at her career, her writing (including her years with The Independent) and the legacy she leaves behind in every perfectly seasonal plate that now feels like common sense.
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Christmas sandwiches have become unhinged – so why does Britain keep buying them? |
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They're overpriced, structurally unsound and weirder by the year, yet we buy them anyway. Hannah Twiggs investigates the runaway Christmas-sandwich economy, the cold-roast physics behind them and why your pick reveals more about you than it should
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Every November, Britain enters a kind of seasonal delirium. One moment, the supermarket shelves are lined with perfectly sensible meal deals; the next, they're stuffed with turkey, stuffing, cranberry chutney and whatever new "innovation" the nation's product developers have dreamt up in a windowless room.
Overnight, the humble sandwich becomes a festival of overcomplication: pigs-in-blankets ciabattas, Yorkshire pudding wraps, Boxing Day curry wedged between slices of onion bread, porchetta baguettes littered with parmesan, cranberries and shredded apple.
For reasons that defy science and sanity, this is the month we collectively decide that an entire roast dinner belongs in a cold, portable £5 (if you're lucky) lunch format.
But even by our own standards, the Christmas sandwich economy has become unhinged. At the top end, you have Leon's Veggie Twistmas ciabatta, stuffed with roasted squash, halloumi, apricot-and-pine-nut stuffing and pomegranate molasses sauce, retailing at £7.99. Gail's is charging £7.80 for its smoked turkey and Swiss cheese sandwich. Starbucks' Festive Feast Toastie comes in at £6.65. These are prices that would have felt absurd for a hot lunch five years ago, let alone something eaten with one hand at your desk.
It's the dissonance that makes Christmas sandwiches so compelling: they're billed as limited-edition luxuries, marketed like collector's items, yet held to the very low standards of something grabbed in a queue behind a man buying Monster and Rizla. And perhaps that contradiction is why so many of them are, frankly, a bit terrible.
Read the full article here
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"At The Independent, we've always believed journalism should do more than describe the world – it should try to improve it.
This Christmas, we're asking for your help again as we launch our new campaign with the charity Missing People – the SafeCall appeal.
Every year, more than 70,000 children in the UK are reported missing. The misery that follows – for the child, for the family, for the community – is often hidden. Too many of these young people have nowhere to turn when they need help most. SafeCall will change that. Our goal is to raise £165,000 to help Missing People launch this new, free service – designed with the input of young people themselves – offering round-the-clock support, advice and a route to safety."
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| The Fast 800 Favourites delivers the kind of food we actually want to eat: grounded in science, rich in flavour and full of nostalgia. Whether it's a protein-packed chorizo omelette, a warming salmon traybake, or a zingy Persian love cake – this is gut-friendly comfort cooking that nourishes both body and soul, while keeping things simple, delicious and real.
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