Forget butter boards… ‘charfruiterie’ is the only platter that matters

Following TikTok’s ‘butter board’ craze, the traditional cold-cuts spread has upped its game and become Instagrammable – and plant-based. Are you ready to carve and artfully sculpt the contents of your fruit bowl, asks Claire Cohen

The viral food trend – which requires beautifully arranged carved fruit – is all the rage (Kerry Gleason / @farmhousechicrental)

Time was that Boxing Day offered up the simplest meal of the year. A moment for bringing together all your festive leftovers in one glorious buffet – turkey, sprouts, parsnips, baguettes, cheese, mince pies, yule log, Christmas pud, bread sauce, brandy butter… – and adding an unnecessary platter of cold meats, plus a serious quantity of pickled onions.

Just when you hoped you’d never see the Christmas Eve gammon again, there it was, sitting alongside a Jacob’s cracker selection box and a highly questionable jar of Uncle Doug’s courgette chutney from when he had that bumper crop in 2010.

Ah, good times – but no longer. Like so much in life, the Boxing Day spread has been forced to up its game and become Instagrammable.

We should have seen it coming, I suppose, since we now photograph and share every single thing we eat, not to mention that no meal is Insta-worthy unless it’s been “tablescaped”.

Last year, came the invasion of the butter board. Instead of putting their feet up with a tin of Quality Street, everyone appeared to be smearing premium butter over wooden chopping boards, topping it with Himalayan salt, sprigs of rosemary and cranberries, and invited guests to get busy with a tear-and-share loaf. I saw one person who had shaped their splat of organic dairy into a Christmas tree and used two pigs in blankets for the trunk. A hard no.

But come back, butter boards – all is forgiven. For unto us, a new trend has been born – and it’s elegantly carving a selection of fruit and carefully arranging it on a wooden platter.

The name given to this art of whittling strawberries, pineapple, grapes and mango into flowers and spirals is… ‘charfruiterie’.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

The idea has been bubbling under for a while, after Chrissie Teigen’s food brand, Cravings, shared a video on Instagram. In said clip, Teigen’s mother, Pepper, got to work on a pile of fruit, creating strawberry flowers, mango sticks and pineapple ridges, while also rubbing the discarded rind onto her hands and saying “so good for your skin”. So far, so Hollywood.

Since then, a monster has been created. Instagram is full of people putting together #charfruiterie boards, decorated with oranges shaped like butterflies, kiwis cut into snowflakes and fruit arranged in ombre rainbow stripes. Some rebels even permit nuts and seeds to make an appearance. And, yes, those all important edible flowers are there for decoration – fruit being the ugly duckling of the natural world.

Sainsbury’s has even been selling a ‘Charcuter Tree’ board this Christmas, about which the less said the better.

Worse news, according to US talk show Today, the charfruiterie trend is going to hang around in 2024 as a “healthy, dessert-centric” option, allowing dried apricot and mango to “ultimately have its moment”. Phew, I was worried there for a second.

The point of all this, of course, is that it’s healthy and fits seamlessly into the wellness trend that now dominates our every waking moment. Charfruiterie is the sort of thing you can imagine Gwyneth Paltrow tucking into alongside a nice vaginal steam and a go on her new solid-gold vibrator ($15,000 on Goop, non-returnable).

Which presumably means the usual Boxing Day trimmings are out of fashion. After all, if being health-conscious is your top platter priority, then copious amounts of Stilton, Camembert, cold cuts and sausage rolls aren’t going to make the grade.

You might be surprised to hear that I can’t see it taking off among my family. Not least because we consume an alarming amount of cheese on Boxing Day – a mythology my husband assumed had been vastly exaggerated before his first Cohen Christmas. Never have the words “bloody hell, you guys really do put it away” been received so warmly.

But one person’s Wensleydale is another’s papaya carved into a rose. So, in case you’re planning your own charfruiterie board this Boxing Day, I can tell you that Pepper used a paring knife for the strawberries, a santoku knife for the pineapple and something approaching an axe to glide through a ripe mango.

As one Instagram commenter put it, “I’d probably hack my finger off with that”. And what else is Boxing Day for, if not a trip to A&E?