Ready in 20 minutes ... boil-in-the-bag turkey with all the trimmings

But chef Anthony Flinn has decided to drag the seasonal turkey feast into the 21st Century – by creating a boil-in-the-bag version that takes a mere 20 minutes to prepare.

Mr Flinn's "hassle-free" meal costs £20 per person, is delivered in a pizza-sized box and includes turkey, ginger-glazed carrots, red cabbage, roast potatoes and a red wine sauce.

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The meat and vegetables are pre-cooked, seasoned and sealed in separate plastic bags.

Following instructions written on a small piece of cardboard, the lazy cook need only place each bagged item into a large pan of boiling water in the correct order.

The roast potatoes alone need to go into the oven. But as they, too, are part-cooked, they take only minutes to finish off.

The entire creation should be ready in just 20 minutes, insists Mr Flinn.

The 27-year-old chef, who runs the award-winning Anthony's restaurant in Leeds, said: "I originally devised it for a friend of mine who couldn't face the hassle of cooking on Christmas Day.

"But it is such a simple formula that I thought it would be a great thing to offer to all my customers.

"The information is very simple. Put item A in now, this one five minutes later, this one five minutes after that. I have been altering the times slightly all the time to get it absolutely right.

"If you did without the roast potatoes you could do the rest of the meal in about eight minutes."

Mr Flinn, a devotee of Michelin-starred chef Heston Blumenthal's scientific approach to cooking, closed his order book for the boil-in-the-bag meals on Friday and he will deliver his food to customers on Christmas Eve so that it is fresh.

He said: "I firmly believe it will all go well but if there are any problems I won't let anyone's Christmas be ruined.

"I will go round to the customers' homes and cook their dinner for them."

The Mail on Sunday's food critic Tom Parker Bowles put the meal to the test – and was amazed by the result.

He said: "Christmas lunch is probably my least favourite meal so news of a boil-in-the-bag version filled me with gloom. But once it was on the plate, things started to look up.

"The sprouts were perfectly cooked, studded with fat shards of decent bacon and the carrots equally exemplary, spiced up with fresh ginger.

"The free-range turkey approached succulence. The potatoes were drearily institutional and the gravy rather flaccid but this was a remarkably superior Christmas lunch."