THE SUNDAY ROAST
Ah, the old-fashioned English Sunday roast, famed in song, story and the sort of well-bred television series in which the women wear cardigans and the men tweed jackets, and intrusions from anything so vulgar as a plot are few and discreetly apologetic. The traditional British Sunday joint with all the trimmings – a slab of roast meat with roast potatoes, gravy and a variety of vegetables – seems to be dying out in British households in these more health-conscious times, although you can still get it at the pub, and a fine meal it continues to be, if maybe not what one would immediately describe as light on the digestive system. But its memory needs to be celebrated before it vanishes altogether; and here, for history’s sake, is your very own guide on how to make the traditional home-cooked Sunday roast as presented during its glory days of the 1960s, courtesy of my late and sainted mother, Mary Josephine Barrett Donnelly (1921-1986).
1. Have your husband befriend a local butcher called Tom, who is also a Catholic, and who in religious solidarity will meticulously save the choicest cut of beef in his shop for Mr. Donnelly’s Sunday roast. Have your husband walk to Tom the butcher’s on the Saturday morning to bear this treasure home in triumph, to be gazed at by the entire family, prodded admiringly and exclaimed over with a level of wonderment that would have the Hanging Gardens of Babylon sighing wistfully and wondering just where they had fallen short.
2. On the Sunday, go to the early morning Mass, and hurry home in time to get the meal started. Heat the oven to a medium to high temperature, place inside it the tender cut of Tom the butcher’s finest English beef, and cook the bejesus out of it until it has achieved throughout the consistency of the finest English leather boot. As it begins to shriek in agony at the oven’s hell fires, occasionally cock your head tenderly towards the kitchen, smile fondly, and softly remark, “Just listen to it singing away to itself in there.”
3. After two hours, seriously endanger both your eyeballs and the skin of your hands by tipping into the spitting hot fat around the shriveling beef a bunch of peeled and cut up potatoes. For the next hour, the potatoes will roast in the fat, soaking up all the sumptuous juices that have fled, screaming, from the poor, tortured meat; these will be by far and away the tastiest part of the meal, and in a few decades’ time, their mere appearance on your daughter’s Californian kitchen table will provoke unseemly scenes of squabbling among her jostling in-laws. No one will be allowed to admire the potatoes today, however, because all civilized people know that it is Tom the butcher’s bootlike beef, and not some upstart tuber pretender, that must stand unchallenged as the star of the Sunday roast.
4. Close to carving time, heat up a can of carrots. Why you choose to use canned carrots rather than fresh remains mysterious, as fresh carrots are easy enough to cook and scarcely in short supply in rainy, rich-soiled Britain. Maybe it’s a relic of the War rationing – you never thought to explain this, and since no one ever thought to question you about it, we will now never know. Occasionally, and for no particular discernible reason, accompany these with a head of fresh cauliflower, which you will boil whole, and serve covered in plain white béchamel sauce, which will add little to the flavor and which is actually somewhat bothersome to make, but it will not occur to you to save yourself the trouble and not make it, because this is how cauliflower is served. Such are the times in which you live.
5. At dishing up time, ask your husband, brightly, how large a portion he wants of the traditional giant popover called Yorkshire pudding, which you will have made along the way. He will reply that he does not want any at all, as he does not care for Yorkshire pudding. You and your husband will enjoy a happy and mutually satisfying union that will end only after 37 years with your sadly untimely death: nevertheless, this item of breaking news – after Mass! On a Sunday! – will come as a source of astonishment, outrage, and betrayal to you, Sunday after Sunday, for the entire duration of your married life.
6. Serve the food, accompanied by gravy made with the meat-flavored powder called Bisto and eye-wateringly potent Colman’s English mustard, made from scratch, thank you, by mixing mustard powder and water with your own hand, because there’ll be none of your new-fangled pre-mixed mustard to go with the Bisto gravy and canned carrots in this house. Where would it end?
7. Sit down to eat. Invite all family members to be as lavish as they please in heaping adulation on the rock-like doorsteps of beef through which they are attempting valiantly to saw with mere table knives. Graciously accept any plaudits for the Yorkshire pudding which your husband has so shockingly spurned. Sigh quietly in despair should your daughter prove so déclassée as to attempt to praise the potatoes.
8. After the main course, serve pudding, which is what English people call dessert, which will reliably consist of some sort of homemade pie, usually apple or rhubarb, or sometimes, excitingly, in the autumn apple and blackberries, covered by a thick blanket of custard. This will provide far more carbohydrate than anyone at the table will begin to need, but it will be voraciously devoured nevertheless. The Sunday roast experience involves a pudding, and the Donnellys are a hungry bunch.
9. Finish the meal. Retire to the living room, where the family will slump together, too stuffed into semi-comatosity to engage in their usual arguments, and watch an Ealing comedy on the flickering black and white television. You might stay awake for the length of the film; but then again, you just might not. Sometimes there will be a box of Quality Street chocolates to pass around. This will be the best part of the Sunday roast of all.