The Illusive Panna Cotta.
Every year my partner and his family pre-order some food for their Christmas dinner from Marks & Spencer, so that it is ready for collection a few days before Christmas. This is a completely new thing for me, as I’ve always just gone to a mid-tier supermarket and done a weekly shop, adding in a turkey and trimmings as I go.
However, this year I was lucky enough to win a £100 gift card from work and could choose where I would like to spend it. Amazing. There were so many options, but I thought if I chose to spend it at M&S then we can get our Christmas shopping done for free! We wanted to make this year particularly special, not only for, you know, reasons, but also because we were spending our first Christmas together as homeowners in our new house.
My partner was absolutely buzzing, he kept telling me how his favourite dessert of all time is the M&S Panna Cotta. Never before have I seen him get so excited about a singular dish – a feat in itself!
Flash-forward to late November and we decide to get our pre-order secured and get that all-important Panna Cotta. What I didn’t anticipate was along with the excitement of 2020 almost being over and the fact that people take pre-ordering their Christmas dinner VERY seriously, that most of the Christmas food would be out of stock.
I could see the excitement fading from his face as we scrolled through a sea of ‘out of stock’ listings on their website. The roast potatoes. The parsnips. The cheese. Then he uttered, in a tone I can only describe as mournful, “Check the desserts.”
My cursor hovered over the ‘desserts’ category. Click. “M&S Panna Cotta: Out of Stock.” This was the cherry on top of the proverbial cake, the straw that broke the camel’s back, and the final boss of 2020. As Taylor Swift sings in her song ‘epiphany’ from the Folklore album “Some things you just can’t speak about.”
The dust of bitter disappointment settled and we tried to salvage as much of a Christmas meal as was possible. We navigated back through the Out of Stock Sea, finding what we could….
-A Camembert sharing board for six
-A tray of pigs in blanket
-A turkey for twelve people
A glimmer of hope twinkled in the distance, as we saw that the 18th of December is the official date that M&S get their “trimmings range” in stock. We set a reminder on the shared calendar. We waited.
We set alarms to wake us up an hour before our usual alarm. Put on our festive jumpers, donned our face masks and grabbed a reusable M&S bag from under the stairs. We arrive at Marks and Spencer, its name glowing in the early morning light. A beacon calling us home.
No queue. Exactly as anticipated. Automatic doors creek open, hand sanitiser pumped on entry, the hunt begins. We snake through the aisles, dodging slow shoppers as we go. We have one goal here: To recover the Panna Cotta and save Christmas.
I take a right down an aisle and suddenly, there it is. Its glistening packaging like a smile from a stranger, comforting and restorative. We carefully pull it from the shelf and rest it in our basket.
“Its okay, we’ve got you now.”
The rest of the shop is a blur. I come back to consciousness and we are already at home and unpacking our shopping bags. My partner’s only wish was to find the Christmas Panna Cotta and bring it home to nestle in our fridge until Christmas day.
Today we made that dream come true.
