Skip to main content
Main

Christmas Dinner

A traditional Christmas dinner featuring turkey, ham, suckling pig, potatoes, squash, turnips, beans, yams, sauces, biscuits, pies, cakes, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Winter squash and yam share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Christmas Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mains

  1. Roast the whole turkey.

  2. Garnish the turkey with strings of red cranberries.

  3. Serve cold sliced ham.

  4. Roast the suckling pig.

Make the sides

  1. Prepare mashed potatoes.

  2. Cook winter squash.

  3. Make creamed turnips.

  4. Steam string beans.

  5. Prepare candied yams.

  6. Serve cranberry sauce.

  7. Make homemade pickles.

Preserves, bread and desserts

  1. Prepare strawberry jam.

  2. Prepare damson preserves.

  3. Serve honey and country butter.

  4. Bake hot biscuits.

  5. Prepare mince pie.

  6. Prepare plum pudding.

  7. Prepare fruit cake.

  8. Serve milk.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Winter squash + yamtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + yamtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Winter squash + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beans + yamtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Turkey
Roasting cooks the bird through and browns its skin, giving the main roasted centrepiece.
Suckling pig
Roasting cooks the meat through and crisps the skin, forming the main roasted centrepiece.
Winter squash
Cooking softens its dense flesh and adds natural sweetness to the savoury sides.
Hot biscuits
Baking sets the dough into a light, flaky texture when served warm.

Swap the winter squash

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, ham, potato, turnip, beans, yam, cranberry):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Winter squashthe original
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Lemonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, ham, potato, turnip, beans, yam, cranberry. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Potato BiscuitPotato Biscuit32 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesTurkey SoupTurkey Soup71 recipes