12 Days of Holiday Food Memories: Jon Bonné's Adopted Christmas

We asked a dozen food world luminaries to help us count down the next 12 days with culinary nostalgia, and they gave us their favorite stories of supermarket eggnog, standing rib roasts, discounted candy, and lots of cheer. Enjoy, and happy holidays!

Photo credit: Getty Images. Lettering: Brian Kaspr

San Francisco Chronicle wine editor Jon Bonné grew up celebrating a mishmash of Hanukkah and Christmas—his parents were Jewish, but enamored with the richness of Yuletide traditions. As an adult, he developed his own set of holiday customs, shaped by the various places he’s called home: New York, Seattle, and San Francisco among them. So for Bonné, the dishes and drinks on the table during this time provide a glimpse back at a lifetime, thus far, well-fed. 

Hanukkah was really an uninspired holiday growing up. Christmas… it’s one of those things that I’ve adopted. Once you accept the secular value of Christmas—not just as a cultural holiday, but [that] it’s based on pagan rituals as much as anything else—why the hell not celebrate it?

I think one tradition that’s been around longest for me—and certainly works well in San Francisco now that we’re into crab season—is freshly steamed Dungeness crab with butter. I make it somewhere between the 15th of December and the New Year. It’s really my one time of the year to unabashedly enjoy a rich and even slightly oaky white wine. It’s the time to bring out the full-gun Chardonnay! You have this kind of perfectly Californian Christmas feast. 

And usually on Christmas day, I’ll make cioppino. I admittedly totally use Michael Mina’s recipe; the only occasional difference is that I’ll sub in crab stock. I honestly wish that I had a completely sui generis cioppino recipe. I’ve made my little tweaks, but really Michael Mina’s is so damn good.

It’s the only time for lebkuchen—cookies that I actually eat. I really have no palate for sweets. It’s probably really saved me over the years. But there’s something about them that really tastes like Christmas to me.

The actual sort of Christmas-y part of the holiday started for me when I was a kid. But the crab and the cioppino started in Seattle about a decade ago. And I moved to California about seven years ago.

I think having a long family tradition is wonderful, but everyone moves around so much these days. I think there’s a value to finding traditions that reflect where you are. Especially in San Francisco where it’s very easy to disregard the real food traditions that are here. Something existed before Alice Waters! And I think there’s value to revisiting that. The value of old San Francisco. It always represented a seasonal bounty before anyone really thought about those things. 

For me there’s a value to simply kind of paying homage to the place that you’ve adopted.