Food For You

Sunday Lunch down the Pub

The first dish that comes to the mind of most non-Brits when you mention British food is the infamous fried breakfast. People will give you an incredulous look and ask ‘do you really eat that for breakfast?’ When you answer 'yes' all their worst suspicions are confirmed – British food must really be bad.

The truth be told, a good fry-up can be a very tasty and healthy - no, really! However to get to the point, the fried breakfast distracts from what should be the top of peoples’ lists when it comes to the most famous British dish – the Sunday roast.

A traditional Sunday in the UK involves the family gathering together to share a roast dinner. Some people, more usually the women of the household, dedicate hours of their Sunday afternoon orchestrating the careful preparation of the roast in the kitchen. Everything is planned down to the minute to ensure that all of the dinner arrives on the table at the same time piping hot.

A typical roast dinner would include meat, carrots, broccoli, roast potatoes, parsnips, meat and the pièce de résistance, the Yorkshire pudding. My mum describes Yorkshire puddings as being made from choux pastry, which in my ignorance I always understood as shoe pastry, until I looked it up on Wikipedia! However, I don’t think many people actually know what choux pastry is so it is easier to describe them as soft and fluffy yummy round things, tasting like pancakes. All this is covered with gravy made from the meat juices.

Roast dinner with beef

Every meat has a matching sauce – spicy horseradish with beef, cranberry with chicken, apple with pork and mint with lamb.  

Chicken Pie

Whilst many people cook their roast at home, others take the easy option and head down to their local pub to have all the hard work done for them. This is what my parents and I did a short while ago, when we drove out to the Wheelwrights Arms one Sunday afternoon. Each of us ordered a different dish – one the roast, another the chicken pie and the third Yorkshire puddings, filled with sausages, onion and potato.  

Pies are certainly a quintessential British dish – and probably go a long way in explaining our expanding waistlines. The most renowned pie is Steak and Kidney but pretty much any filling can be used.
 
If you are ever in the Reading area try out Sweeney and Todd’s pie shop, where pretty much all the locals are obsessed with it.

Yorkshire Puddings filled with sausage, potato and onions

All this food is washed down with Real Ale – also known as ‘warm beer’ to anyone not familiar with English beverages, although for the pedantic room-temperature is a more accurate description. The movement for Real Ale has near cult-status among its followers – for many Real Ale is not just beer, it’s a way of life and must be protected at all costs from the threat posed by lager-lovers! There is even an organisation solely dedicated to the promotion and preservation of Real Ale, called Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). They organise Real Ale festivals all over England, a list of which can be found here.

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