There are many delicious foods that we associate with Christmas day dinner! It’s lovely to sit around the table with your family and good friends, to tuck into Christmas favourites like roast turkey, crispy roast potatoes and crunchy green sprouts. Or maybe not the sprouts for everyone?! Then there’s pudding, with a choice of mince pies dolloped with thick cream, or a slice of Christmas cake or perhaps a lovely, huge portion of Christmas pudding! Whatever we like to eat on Christmas Day, one thing is for certain, food plays a central role in our celebrations. Inside the collection at The National Archives there are hundreds of documents that can tell us about the food eaten at Christmas, from Tudor times through to the twentieth century. These documents include adverts for Christmas food, recipes and even photographs of some of this festive fare! Below are a selection of a few of our favourite documents relating to food at Christmas in the past.
See what you can find out about Christmas food from looking at these documents and answering the questions. Then, if you’d like to get crafty and creative, take a look at some of our ideas for making food inspired Christmas decorations or even have a go at baking our medieval recipe for mince pies!
Craft activity
Now that you’ve explored the archive documents all about Christmas food, you can use them as inspiration to get crafty and creative! Have a go at some of these fun activities!
- Design your own Christmas day dinner plate, filling it with all of the foods that you’d like to eat for Christmas Day dinner! You might enjoy eating something quite traditional like roast turkey, or maybe you’d like to invent your own weird and wonderful Christmas dishes such as chocolate covered sprouts or Mince Pies filled with real minced meat! Draw or write about your ideas, or you could even have a go at making them out of play-dough or clay.
- Make your own Christmas food inspired decorations. Take a look at some of the ideas on Pinterest for making polymer clay Christmas puddings and gingerbread men to hang on your Christmas tree!
- Take a look at our bonus document, an Early Modern recipe for Christmas mince pies (SP 14/189 f.7, Six Mince Pies of Indifferent Bigness!) Now have a go at following an adapted version of this recipe. Which do you prefer to eat, seventeenth century savoury pies or the sweet mince pies we have today?
Document challenge:
Take a look at the document with reference CO 956/62:
- What different ingredients can you see on this document? Can you tell which countries some of the ingredients might have come from?
- What type of Christmas food do you think this person is making? Why do you think this?
- Can you spot anything that can give us a clue as to when this document was made?
This document comes from the Empire Marketing Board files in the Colonial Office records. It is called ‘Making the Empire Christmas Pudding’ and was painted by an artist called F.C. Harrison. The image shows how ingredients used to make this Christmas pudding have come from different countries across the globe. It was painted between 1927-1933, when Britain was still in control of the British Empire.