*Special* An English Sunday Roast - The Long Read
The Humble Sunday
Roast
Now, let me first start
by saying that this doesn't necessarily happen in every household
throughout the UK on a Sunday. But, with that being said, I bet you'd
be hard-pressed to find a household that isn't doing this on a
Sunday, in one form or another. Lunch time or Dinner time, this is
how it goes down:
This picture accurately
sums up the (now becoming more dated, I admit) English appetite:
meat, two lots of vegetables, and a portion of potatoes.
Let's talk about the
meat, first of all:
Here, we have lamb. In
my family, lamb is something we try to eat sparingly because have had
the privilege to have eaten some delicious lamb over the years (as we
bread our own sheep), therefore we find it difficult to get a good
piece and we treat it lovingly when we do. Other popular meat
alternatives include beef, pork, chicken, turkey and duck (very rare
in our household).
Our lamb was roasted in
the oven on a fairly low heat for a long time. Nothing added to it at
all, just the way I like it! I am all for a garlic rub or some
rosemary with my lamb, but sometimes it's nice just to let the meat
speak for itself.
Next, let's talk about
the vegetables:
Broccoli and carrots we
have here. I am a big fan of broccoli and try to eat it as much as
possible. However, carrots I tend to eat less of. Both of these
vegetables are boiled with just a little salt. However, my favourite
roast dinner vegetable dish is cauliflower cheese, closely followed
by roasted parsnips. Cauliflower cheese is basically cauliflower with
a cheese sauce sloshed on top, and baked in the oven – cheesy
bliss! Roasted parsnips are fairly self explanatory, but you have to
make sure they are thinly cut and nice and crunchy, yum yum!
The penultimate talking
point is most certainly the potatoes:
Here we have a very
simple, no fuss, new potato boiled. Chopped in half, seasoned with
salt and boiled for around 20-25mins, it oozes simplicity. However,
never look past the roast potato! I absolutely adore roast potatoes,
but, the best ones are done with goose fat – insanely high in fat
and salt... :( Other popular potato dishes are mash (boiled potatoes
that are drained, and then mashed together with milk and butter to
create a potato paste), dauphinois (thinly sliced potatoes layered
with a cheese sauce and baked in the oven) and also the potato gratin
(tiny straws of potato mixed together in a bowl with a white sauce,
cheese and egg, then moulded into pancakes and fried in the pan). We
are certainly a creative bunch when it comes to potatoes!
Finally, the real
discussion can take place – the gravy (a sauce made from the
cooking juices of the meat, or Bisto):
I don't like gravy,
there, I said it! As an Englishman, not liking gravy is like the
Taiwanese equivalent of not liking XO sauce, it's sacrilege. Whenever
I state this amongst Englishmen, the question most often asked is:
“Doesn't that just make everything really dry?”. No, absolutely
not. If your meal is so dry that you need to drown it with a viscous,
brown sauce that barely resembles anything at all, then whoever
cooked it (sorry to all mums, dads, chefs, cooks, grandmas, grandads
who make a sunday roast and then drown it in gravy) has done a poor
job! The meat should be deliciously moist and juicy, the vegetables
should still retain their integrity and give off enough juice, too.
If you insist on using a sauce to compliment your meal, then for lamb
use onion sauce or mint sauce, for beef use horseradish sauce, for
pork use English mustard or apple sauce, for chicken use a cranberry
sauce, for turkey use bread sauce and for duck use a cherry sauce.
Don't feel obliged to pour over that brown, tasteless sauce just to
make everything slide down that little bit easier, branch out a bit!
Venting – complete.
What's your favourite meat for a Sunday Roast? Veggies? Potatoes? Gravy or no gravy?
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