I'll Be Home for Christmas Dinner! Quiz

Answer: Butter tarts

There's a lot of controversy about what makes the perfect butter tart - is it firm, or runny? Does it have raisins, or nuts, or both, or neither? Maple syrup or golden syrup or brown sugar? Lard or butter or shortening in the crust? What there must be is an egg, butter, and sweet filling, in a small pastry crust.

My perfect butter tart has a crisp top of caramelized sugar over a runny filling, with raisins and walnuts. There are always butter tarts on our holiday table.

Answer: A kind of cake

"Kuchen" is just a German word for "cake" but to Germans from Russia who settled in the prairie and great plains regions of Canada and the US, it's a specific kind of custard cake, usually with fruit such as rhubarb or plums, sometimes with cottage cheese. In our house, it was only made at Christmas.

My ethnic community, sometimes known as Black Sea Germans, emigrated to Russia during the time of Catherine the Great. For the most part, they kept their own language and religion, and settled in small tightly knit groups. By the late 19th century, conditions were not so favourable, and they left for North America in large numbers.

Answer: Strawberries

Tourtičre is meat pie, most often made with ground meat, sometimes meat in chunks. It may contain potatoes, and is often spiced with cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon. It is traditionally eaten after mass on Christmas Eve, but really you will see it one way or another on many holiday tables.

Answer: Strata

A strata can contain just about anything you like, in a rough ratio of two parts bread, one part egg (by volume), one part milk, one part cheese and one part other stuff like onions and peppers and bacon and sausage and ham and tomato and whatever you want, really. You can mess with those last two parts to make it as simple or complex as you choose - you could go with just bread and eggs and milk if you like. Traditionally a strata is layered, but that seems to have disappeared in many modern recipes.

Answer: Peanuts

Peanuts (not technically a nut, but a legume) are a relatively new foodstuff in the European and North American tradition, not being widely eaten before the late 19th century. These days they have a significant presence in most jars of shelled mixed nuts, but are not usually seen in a bowl of nuts in the shell.

For me, walnuts are the king of the nut bowl, as the quest to get a whole unbroken walnut free of its shell can happily occupy me for an entire evening!

Answer: No

Many of us have fond memories of the taste of a stuffing spooned out from inside the bird, saturated with meat juices...ahhh.

Less fond are the memories that many also have, of salmonella and e coli outbreaks, and Boxing Day trips to the hospital.

The problem is that it's very hard to get a perfectly cooked turkey, and a safely cooked stuffing, at the same time in the same bird. In order for the stuffing to reach a safe temperature, the meat will be badly overcooked.

"But, I cook everything in my dressing before I stuff the turkey!" I hear you say. "It's already safely cooked, so no problem then, right?" Well, wrong. That well-cooked stuffing went into a raw bird, and raw meat juices soaked into it.

Luckily, you can get the taste in other ways. Your dressing can be made with turkey broth (homemade or bought) and you can also spoon some of the juices from the bottom of the pan over it, before you use the rest of those juices to make gravy. And, yes, a little of that gravy on the stuffing helps, too!

Answer: 165 F

Generally, you take the temperature of a roast with a thermometer inserted into the thickest part, not touching a bone. Something large, like a turkey, can be taken out of the oven 5 - 10 degrees cooler than the recommended temperature, as it will continue to cook while it rests.

Researching this, I found that the answer was not quite as clear as I'd always thought - you will still find some places recommending 180 F, and there is a growing movement to go to 150 F. It all comes down to what temperature is needed to kill salmonella at which rate, so it's not just a question of what temperature is reached, but of how long the meat is kept at that temperature.

Personally, I'd rather err on the side of no salmonella, please, but I also don't want dry and overcooked turkey. My solution, which won't work for everyone, is to roast the bird breast side down, so the white meat gathers all the juices. You don't get a picture-perfect golden turkey that way, but my family doesn't care.

Answer: 1912

Not surprisingly, commercial sales of a jellied cranberry sauce started in New England, in Hanson, Massachusetts. The familiar ribbed can became widely available in the 1940s.

My family stays out of the cranberry sauce wars, preferring not to have any at all. However, we do like a dish of candied cranberries on the holiday table - they look so pretty, and pop so satisfactorily when you bite them.

They're easy to make, too - soak whole raw cranberries in a sugar syrup, then roll them in more sugar, and allow to dry. That's it!

Answer: Any of these methods can be used

My mother always made a roux of the fat from the turkey juices, browned in the roasting pan with all the little brown bits of skin. Then whisk in the pan juices, some broth, and some potato water - very tasty.

I'm a little lazier, usually just add a slurry to my broth-plus-pan juices mixture. Reduction would probably not work terribly well to make a turkey gravy, at least not in the quantities many families like to have it.

And, of course, there is always the "open a can and don't tell anybody" method.

Answer: A rolled cake decorated to look like a log

Bűche de Noël is essentially a jelly roll - sponge cake filled and rolled, and iced to resemble a Yule log. There is usually chocolate involved, sometimes in the cake, sometimes in the filling, and almost always in the frosting. Some are very beautiful and elaborate, while some are just the basic log with squiggles made with a fork in the frosting to make it look like bark.

Not too heavy, after a heavy meal.