In Mexico, roast turkey means one can tuck into rich, unctuous mole sauce, and pig out on salsa de castanas, a Carmen Miranda salad of beetroot, jicama, banana, pineapple and pomegranate.In Spain, the magnificent roasted red bream means a wonderful garlic and chilli donostiarra dressing won't be far away, while Germany's traditional roast goose leads the way for the even more traditional apple, raisin and nut stuffing and red cabbage with redcurrant jelly.The best is yet to come, of course. Amid the wreckage of opened presents, broken promises, empty bottles, disappointments and unprecedented joy, we can all sit down to a luscious, heart-warming brandy butter, some delicious, home-churned, vanilla-bean ice-cream, or a smooth and creamy custard flavoured with dark rum.And plum pudding, for those who have to have it.. TEN MILLION festive Britons can't be wrong, can they? That's how many will be slamming turkeys into ovens across the country some time on Friday. According to the accepted rule of thumb, most of these turkeys will go into a hot oven for 20 minutes per pound, plus 20 minutes, if they weigh up to 10lb. And above that weight, 15 minutes per pound, plus 15 minutes. Most of them, when they reach the table, will be dry and unpalatable, claims turkey farmer Paul Kelly "Not just overcooked," he says "Cremated. No wonder people complain that they don't like it, that it's too dry.

Turkey is deliciously moist it you don't overcook it." With only five days to go to the main event, this is truly provocative stuff. What Paul Kelly is saying is that the accepted figures are seriously wrong. Turkey cooks through in half those times; so a 10lb turkey needs only 10 minutes per pound, plus 10 minutes.If Paul Kelly's findings are accepted, there will need to be some huge revisions made within the turkey industry before next Christmas. For the figures by which we all desiccate our festive lunches are put out by the British Turkey Information Service, which informs hundreds of the nation's cookery writers and editors. And the BTIS's figures for fresh and frozen birds - including cooking times for every weight of turkey, from five to 30lb - are accepted without question.This year, these cooking times have appeared in nearly every journal in the country, including the top-selling food publication BBC Good Food Magazine, as well as Sainsbury's Magazine, and the periodicals of Waitrose, Marks & Spencer and Tesco.Paul Kelly is one of the leading figures in the turkey industry who, along with his father Derek Kelly, pioneered the foodies' favourite bird for flavour, the Kelly Bronze.

It has picked up just about every turkey prize going in the last few years. I went to the family farm in Essex to have a look at these famous free-range birds. With their distinctive bronze feathers, they resemble the first wild turkeys which roamed the forests of the Americas.Paul Kelly breeds nearly half a million of them a year, selling 400,000 as one-day-old chicks to selected farmers, who rear them to his specifications. He keeps back around 30,000, which he farms himself for the Christmas market. I joined him in the middle of the frenetic three-week period in which he and his team dry-pluck all the birds. In a large, airy, indoor space which resembled nothing so much as a Peter Greenaway film set, with spotlights picking out 50 or so heavily spattered pluckers at work.Paul, 35, is the second-fastest turkey plucker in the world, beaten into the Guinness Book of Records by Irishman Vince Pilkington by five seconds in 1985 The record still stands at three minutes 45 seconds You couldn't keep up that speed for very long.

Paul plucks seven an hour, the best of the rest six, the average plucker four. Hen turkeys are easier to pluck than stags, simply because they are smaller.The Kelly Bronze is the antithesis of the modern turkey - a fast-growing white bird which matures in three months. The latter is the modern cross-breed which made Bernard Matthews' fortune. In fact, Paul's father worked with Matthews in the early days of mass turkey production, but they parted company when Derek told Bernard he'd get nowhere if he ignored his voice of experience. Derek, of course, was spectacularly wrong.In spite of this, Derek decided to take the slow road; in 1982, he bought up all the Bronze turkey flocks in the country. A slow-growing Kelly Bronze takes six months to reach maturity, thus costing the farmer twice as much to rear But that's only a part of the flavour story. When the birds are slaughtered they are dry-plucked, a costly and labour-intensive operation compared to machine plucking, so that they can be hung for two weeks to develop their rich flavour.Such tender loving care pushes up the cost.