The best Bridgemas dinner is a takeaway and here’s why

With Bridgemas just around the corner, the average overheard conversation in the Buttery has quickly become who in your flat is doing the roasties this year and whether a turkey can be microwaved (as a Medwardian, I can’t sympathize with that. Even if they barely work we do have our ovens!).

These conversations tend to involve more stress over time management and googling “easy recipe stuffing student cheap” than excitement over being able to spend time with each other as the term draws to a close. They seem to me to reflect the stress of a last-minute supervision more than an enjoyable event.

While you may accuse me of being out of the spirit of things, I will declare myself anti-traditional Bridgemas dinner. Here’s just a few reasons why. 

Don’t know about you, but I prefer not to be poisoned

Before we’re Bridgemas celebrators, we’re students! Students are notorious for our general inability to cook, let alone in what you can barely call a kitchen that we get in catered accommodations.

While you may personally be able to make a decent pan of roast veg, do you really trust each and every one of your flatmates to cook sufficiently to not poison you or burn down your flat? With some of the suggestions made to the Tab about potential pancake toppings for pancake day this year, I firmly reject the possibility of Cambridge students ruining yet another set of holiday foods.

(I’ll quickly include an apology to my own flatmates. I’m sorry you have to hear it this way but under no circumstances will I be trusting your frying abilities).

How many students does it take to bake gingerbread? (Image credits: Ruby Cline)

The spirit of Bridgemas leaves no room for 2000 words due Friday

Not only are we students, but we’re Cambridge students. With eight-week terms and essays upon essays – let alone you poor sods who have to do coursework too – I barely have time to take myself for a post-lecture cookie at the Arc Cafe (not that it stops me).

A multiple-hour debacle which involves its own Mainsbury’s trip, multiple pots and pans, and all the washing-up that comes with it afterwards is certainly not on the Google Calendar.

Bridgemas shops take commitment (Image credits: Sophie Walk)

‘Is this gluten-free?’

We are loudly and proudly the snowflake generation. Half of us are vegetarian and the other half are gluten sensitive, with a sprinkling of lactose intolerance just to make things interesting.

It seems like an impossibly complex task to cater for each of us with one dish, in particular one which people have specific familial associations with back at home and therefore make everything a bit differently. A friend who will remain unnamed for not-getting-camfessed reasons mentioned in passing that his family’s traditional Christmas dinner involves custard. In the main dinner. I decided I’d prefer not to know where.

Possibly the only thing we can all eat…or is it? (Image credits: Ruby Cline)

So what is the best Bridgemas dinner?

For these reasons, I proudly declare the best possible Bridgemas dinner… a takeaway. Ordering a takeaway, each person can make sure they get at least one thing they like. It offers the same social swapping of food types and the experience of doing something together, without having to fight over hob space.

It allows for timing flexibility for those with an essay due the next morning and means that those who wholeheartedly aim to be extremely hungover the next day can be kept far, far away from an oven.

And after all, you can always drop into the market and pick up some festive mince pies for pudding. Merry Bridgemas!

Feature Image Credits: Ruby Cline

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