How Much Food to Buy Per Person at Christmas

By Arthur Hodgson, Hamper Packing Manager at The Gourmet Pantry.

Per adult, allow 250 g of ham on the bone, 200 g of unpeeled prawns, 60 g of cheese after lunch, four or five crackers, and two or three nibbles for every half hour of standing around beforehand. Count a child under ten as half an adult. Buy about ten per cent over those numbers, not forty, and buy the cupboard half of the list in October.

My job is working out how much goes in a box so it feeds the number it is meant to feed. Christmas lunch is the same problem with a longer list. Most hosts get the centrepiece right, then overbuy everything around it, which is how you end up with four opened packets of crackers and a fridge you cannot shut.

One rule before the numbers. Buy the shelf stable half early, because jars, crackers, nuts and sweets keep for months, and buy the fresh half tight, because that is the part you throw out. Most of the first group sits in the Christmas range.

One number per person, then multiply

The centrepiece: 250 g per adult. That is ham on the bone, which carves down to about 150 g of meat on the plate. Halve it to 125 g if the ham is sharing the table with prawns, a cold chicken and three salads, which at most Australian Christmases it is. Legs do not come in neat sizes, so the real decision is how much leftover you want; our guide to how much ham per person works that through leg by leg.

Seafood: 200 g of unpeeled prawns per adult. Shell and head are about half the weight, so that is five or six decent prawns each as part of a spread, or 300 g if seafood is the whole event. Collect them on Christmas Eve morning and keep them on ice, not in the fridge door.

Salads: 100 g of each salad per adult, three salads maximum. One starch, one green, one sharp. A fourth does not get eaten, it gets photographed. The sharp one is where a jar earns its place, and condiments keep long after the salad has gone.

Nibbles: two or three pieces per person per half hour. People graze for about an hour before sitting down, so five or six pieces each. Nuts, olives and crisps from the snacking range cover it, and a 100 g bag of nuts is roughly one small bowl, which is the useful unit when you are buying rather than weighing.

The whole table, scaled

Buy in packet units, not grams. The note column is where the money gets saved.

For twelve, take the ten column and add a fifth. In between the two, round up on the cupboard items and round down on the fresh ones: a spare packet of crackers is worth nothing in February, and 400 g of leftover prawns is worth less.

Cheese is the course people underbuy

Cheese gets bought by the piece rather than by the person, which is why it either runs out at four o'clock or sits in the fridge until New Year. After a full lunch, 60 g a head is right: 600 g for ten, or three cheeses of about 200 g. When the board is the meal, as on Boxing Day, go to 100 g a head and add a fourth cheese.

Crackers are the part that actually runs out, and the cheapest thing on the table to fix. Allow four or five each. A 100 g packet of rosemary crackerthins at $2.99 is about a plateful and covers four people once a board gets going, so two packets carry ten and four carry twenty. We put a spare packet in every grazing hamper we pack for that reason. The rest of the range, wafer thin through to seeded, is in crackers.

Sweet accompaniments need less than people think. A 75 g fig and almond fruit pyramid at $6.95, sliced thin the way it should be cut anyway, goes around a board of eight, and one jar of relish does the same. Our cheese board guide covers what goes where.

How we scale a box

We do not sell the ham or the prawns. We pack the jars, crackers, nuts and sweets that go around them, by hand, in Corio in Victoria, and three habits from that room transfer straight to a kitchen bench.

Count units, not weight: five packets and three jars is a list you can check at the door, and 1.85 kg of assorted savoury is not. Buy variety at the small end, because three 110 g jars beat one 300 g jar on a board. And split the list by what survives January: jars, crackers, nuts and chocolate get bought in October, everything perishable in the last four days, in the amounts above and not a gram more.

Questions we get asked

How much cheese do you need per person on a cheese board?

Allow 60 g a person when the board follows a full lunch, and 100 g when the board is the meal. For ten people after lunch that is 600 g in total, best split across three cheeses of about 200 g each: something hard, something soft, something blue. Add a fourth cheese over twelve people, and take it all out of the fridge an hour before serving.

How much food do I need for 12 people at Christmas?

Take the ten person column and add a fifth: 3 kg of ham on the bone, 2.4 kg of unpeeled prawns, three salads, 700 g of cheese, three packets of crackers, two jars to spread, and about 1.2 kg of dessert. Round up on anything that keeps in a cupboard, round down on anything fresh. Twelve is also where a second serving spoon and a second bowl for olive pits stop being optional.

How many nibbles per person before lunch?

Two or three pieces for every half hour of standing around, so five or six each across the usual hour. For ten people that is two 100 g bags of nuts, a jar of olives, a packet of crackers and one jar to spread. Put out half and keep the rest sealed, because crackers and crisps go soft fast in an Australian December.

Work out your numbers now, then buy the cupboard half early. The jars, crackers, nuts and sweets are in the Christmas range, shipping is free Australia wide over $100, and weekday orders placed before 12pm are dispatched the same day. If you are the guest this year rather than the host, our Christmas hampers arrive with the counting done. This piece is part of our guide to Christmas food in Australia.