Solstice Bells

The moment in Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) when a rehabilitated Scrooge awakes from his nightmare, asks the boy in the street if the prize goose is still hanging in the butcher's window and tosses down a crown with instructions that he buy the goose and take it to his clerk's house, Bob Cratchet's. Because this is Victorian England, the boy does as he's told, Mrs Cratchit cooks it and Scrooge shows up later that day, unannounced, to eat from it.

Hanging in the window of New Sam PO are barbecued duck, and they are delicious. Half a duck is $20 and will feed three to four people. To accompany the duck I would roast some potatoes and Brussels sprouts, and on the stovetop a rotkhol. As for guests, I would include Mrs Cratchit and her Maori lover, because we never hear much about her in Dicken's tale, and the boy who purchased the goose for Scrooge, who, as advised, kept the change, invested it in a printing press and produced some of Matthew Arnold's first screeds against the "Barbarian" aristocracy and the "Philistine" commercial middle class.