Australian Christmas lunch, planned: a cold menu, seafood quantities and the week before

In short

• Count 250 g of unpeeled cooked prawns per adult when they share the table with ham and chicken, which is five or six large king prawns each. If seafood is the whole lunch, go to 400 g.
• Safe Food Production Queensland advises buying fresh seafood only 1 to 2 days before you eat it, and oysters the day before. Frozen prawns, on the other hand, keep 6 to 8 months below minus 18°C.
• The Food Safety Information Council (2024) says cooked prawns and smoked salmon should not sit out in summer heat for more than 2 hours. Under the FSANZ 2 hour / 4 hour rule, food that has spent 4 hours or more between 5°C and 60°C gets thrown away.
• A leg ham keeps far longer under a cloth soaked in 1 litre of water with two tablespoons of vinegar, changed every three days, in a fridge at 5°C or below (Food Safety Information Council).
• Give the drinks their own esky. It gets opened two hundred times an afternoon; the seafood esky should be opened twice.

Why lunch, and why cold

Most families here sit down somewhere between midday and 1 pm, which is also when the house is at its hottest. A roast turkey in a 200°C oven at that hour turns the kitchen into a sauna and the cook into a grump. That is the real reason the Australian table drifted towards prawns, oysters, cold ham, salads and a dessert that comes out of the fridge: almost everything can be cooked on Christmas Eve, after dark, and served cold.

Plenty of families still do a hot roast, and some keep a pudding with custard because Nan always did. That works fine if it is one hot dish, not four. The rule we use is simple: one thing on the barbie or in the oven on the day, at most. Everything else is assembled, not cooked.

How much to buy per person

These figures assume adults, a long lunch, and the three or four big items of the classic table rather than one star dish. Kids under ten eat about half, unless they are prawn kids, and you already know if yours are. A cooked king prawn loses roughly half its weight to head and shell, which is why the prawn line is given unpeeled: it is the weight you ask for at the counter.

Where those numbers come from

The prawn figure is a working number, generous enough that the platter does not look picked over by the second round. A kilo of large cooked king prawns usually works out at somewhere between 18 and 25 prawns, depending on the grade. The ham line accounts for bone, skin and fat, which together take a fair share of a leg. The ice line is a working rule rather than a regulation: on a 35-degree day, a drinks esky drinks ice.

Peel or don’t peel? A Marine Stewardship Council survey, covered by ABC News in December 2025, found 56 per cent of Australians prefer their prawn already peeled, rising to 66 per cent among gen Z. The same survey expected Australians to get through roughly 18.5 million kg of prawns over the Christmas period. A good compromise: peel half on the morning with clean hands, leave the rest whole for the people who like the ritual, and put out a bowl for shells and a bowl of water with lemon for fingers.

When to buy the seafood (and when to freeze it)

Seafood counters run longer hours in the last days before Christmas, and the queues on the 23rd and 24th can stretch out the door well before opening. Nobody enjoys that queue at 11 am in full sun, with a car park full of tempers. You have two ways around it.

The first is to buy frozen. Plenty of wild-caught prawns are cooked and frozen on the boat, and Safe Food Production Queensland says prawns keep 6 to 8 months in a freezer below minus 18°C. Buy them in early December, when the counters are calm, and thaw them in the fridge overnight from the 24th to the 25th, sitting in a colander over a bowl so they do not soak in their own water. Do not refreeze a prawn that has been thawed: ask at the counter whether the “fresh” prawns were previously frozen, and if so, they go in the fridge, not the freezer.

The second is to buy fresh, at the right moment. Safe Food Production Queensland advises buying fresh seafood only 1 to 2 days before eating it and oysters the day before. In 2026 that means prawns and smoked salmon on Wednesday 23 at opening time, oysters on Thursday 24. Bring an esky with ice in the boot and ask the counter to pack your purchase with ice, as the Food Safety Information Council suggests. At home, the bag goes straight to the coldest spot in your fridge, usually the back of the bottom shelf.

The week before: Saturday 19 to Christmas Day

Before any of this, in the first week of December: order the ham and, if you can, pre-order the prawns. Then the week itself is spread so that no day carries more than a couple of hours of work, and the cooking lands on the coolest evening.

Christmas Day, hour by hour (lunch at 1 pm)

• 8.00 am. Read the fridge thermometer. If you are short on ice, get it now: by mid-morning the servo freezers are often empty.
• 9.00 am. Drinks out of the fridge and into the drinks esky, or into the laundry sink with ice, which the Food Safety Information Council itself suggests. Every bottle you move frees space for food.
• 10.30 am. Peel half the prawns with clean hands, straight back into the fridge in a covered container. Mix the seafood sauce.
• 11.30 am. Slice the ham you will need for the first round, not the whole leg, and put the plate back in the fridge under wrap. Dress the potato and bean salads; leave the leaves undressed until the last minute.
• 12.30 pm. Build the seafood platter on a tray of crushed ice, in the shade, half the prawns at a time. Oysters go out last.
• 1.00 pm. Lunch. Write the time on a sticky note and put it on the fridge door.
• 2.00 pm. Swap time. Fresh prawns and fresh ham from the fridge onto clean plates. Replace, do not top up: the first plates have been out about an hour and a half, so whatever is left on them can still go back into the fridge.
• 3.00 pm. Everything perishable comes off the table. The second round has been out an hour and goes back in the fridge; anything that sat out from the start and missed the swap goes in the bin. Whip the cream, top the pavlova with mango and passionfruit, and serve dessert.
• 4.00 pm. Leftovers in shallow containers, in the fridge. The ham goes back into its damp cloth.

Keeping it cold when it’s 35 degrees

Food safety guidance in Australia lines up on a few numbers. Food Standards Australia New Zealand sets the 2 hour / 4 hour rule: under 2 hours between 5°C and 60°C, food can be used or put back in the fridge; between 2 and 4 hours, it can be used but cannot go back in the fridge; at 4 hours or more, it goes in the bin. FSANZ counts all the time out of the fridge together, including preparation and transport, which matters when prawns spent forty minutes in a hot car. For home cooks, the Food Safety Information Council is blunter in summer: cooked prawns and smoked salmon should not stay out in the heat for more than 2 hours.

The esky does most of the work if you treat it properly. Bring it inside the night before and drop a sacrificial bag of ice in to chill the walls. Pack it with ice at the bottom, food in the middle, ice on top, and keep it in the shade with the lid closed. Two eskies beat one big one: the drinks esky will be opened constantly, the food esky almost never. The frozen water bottles from Sunday do double duty, and they do not leave a puddle in the bottom of the platter.

If you do cook a turkey or a chicken, the Food Safety Information Council asks for 75°C in the thickest part, checked with a meat thermometer. Keep the fridge at 5°C or below, which is harder than it sounds when the door is opening every few minutes and the kitchen is warm. Ask guests not to arrive with seafood or a cream dessert that needs a fridge at the last minute; if they do, it travels in their own esky with ice.

The ham: bag, cloth and how long it lasts

A leg ham bought on the 22nd is meant to last into January, and it will if it can breathe without drying out. The Food Safety Information Council method: take it out of its plastic, cover it with a clean cloth (a ham bag or a cotton pillowcase both work) soaked in 1 litre of water with at least two tablespoons of vinegar, keep the cloth damp and change it every three days, and store the ham at 5°C or below. Safe Food Production Queensland says a ham handled this way keeps for several weeks. Reduced-salt hams do not last as long, so check the label, and freeze whatever you will not get through in the next few days.

Glazing on the evening of the 24th rather than on the morning of the 25th is the single best heat-saving move in this whole plan. Score the fat, brush on the glaze, give it about 30 to 40 minutes in a hot oven while you baste it a few times, then let it cool before it goes back into the fridge. Served cold the next day, it carves more neatly than a warm ham, and the oven has been cold since the night before.

The shopping list by aisle, with the day to buy

This is the classic cold table for 10, built from the quantities above. The point of the “when” column is to keep fresh food out of your fridge for as few days as possible and the queues out of your Christmas Eve. Salt, pepper, oil and basic spices are assumed; check them on the 19th. If you build the menu in Olivi with the servings set to 10, this list comes out of the plan already sorted by aisle, and you only add the “when”.

Who brings what

Bring-a-plate is a good Australian habit, but it is also how a lunch for 10 ends up with four potato salads and no bread. Hand out the dishes on the 19th, along with one rule: anything that needs refrigeration arrives in its own esky with ice, or gets dropped off on the 24th.

• A salad that travels undressed, bread, cheese and crackers, cherries, drinks, a second pavlova and the ice are all easy to hand out.
• Keep the prawns, the oysters and the ham for yourself. They need your fridge and your clock, and a long drive in a hot car is exactly what the 2 hour rule is counting.
• Put each person’s name next to their dish on the list and give them a quantity (one big bowl for 10, not “a salad”). In Olivi, the shopping list can be shared by link, so the cousin bringing the coleslaw sees exactly what is still uncovered.

Boxing Day and the leftovers

Boxing Day falls on a Saturday in 2026, which for many households means the cricket on the telly, nobody cooking, and a fridge full of good things. Safe Food Production Queensland puts cooked seafood leftovers at 2 to 3 days in the fridge (up to 3 months in the freezer), so the prawns that went straight back into the fridge on the 25th make excellent prawn rolls on the 26th: soft white rolls, shredded lettuce, a smear of whatever seafood sauce survived. Prawns that sat on the platter all afternoon do not.

The ham is the gift that keeps giving: ham and mustard toasties, ham fried rice with peas and spring onion, ham and cheese frittata for a late breakfast. Broken pavlova becomes smashed pav in glasses with cream and berries. Freeze the ham bone: Safe Food Production Queensland gives frozen ham leftovers up to 3 months, which takes you nicely to the first cool weeks of autumn and a pot of pea and ham soup.

How to plan Christmas lunch in Olivi

If you prefer paper, the Australian Christmas lunch planner (PDF) prints on three A4 pages: page one is blank, with boxes for the menu, guests and who brings what, what gets made the day before, what stays cold until serving, and the shopping list by aisle with the day to buy; page two is the cold table for 10 filled in; page three is a cheat sheet with quantities for 4 to 16 adults, the 2 hour / 4 hour rule, how long ham and seafood keep, and the morning of the 25th worked back from a 1 pm lunch.

In Olivi, on the web at olivi.ca, start by setting your region to Australia so product suggestions use local names. Then ask Olive, the virtual cooking coach, something like: “Christmas lunch for 10 on 25 December, mostly cold, prawns and ham, one guest is gluten-free, nothing in the oven on the day.” She proposes the dishes and puts them in your plan, and any meal can be moved to the 24th or the 25th so the glazed ham and the chooks land on Christmas Eve. Set each recipe to 10 servings and the quantities recalculate on their own.

The shopping list builds itself from the plan, sorted by aisle. Share it by link with whoever brings the salads or the drinks: they see what is already covered and tick off their part in real time, without creating an account. Nan’s trifle recipe on a stained card can come too: scan the paper recipe and Olive turns it into a recipe you can scale. On the evening of the 24th, cooking mode walks you through the glaze and the chooks one step at a time, each with its own timer.