Information about Sunday Roast

The Sunday roast is a traditional British and Irish main meal served on Sundays (usually in the early afternoon), and consisting of roasted meat together with accompaniments. It is popular throughout Great Britain and Ireland. Other names for this meal are Sunday dinner, Sunday lunch, Roast dinner, and Sunday joint. The traditional Sunday roast has been traced back to Yorkshire, England during the Industrial Revolution. It is believed this tradition arose because the meat could be left in the oven to cook before church on a Sunday morning, and it would be ready when the family arrived home at lunchtime. The meal is often comparable to a less grand version of a traditional Christmas dinner in these cultures.

Sunday roasts are also common (though less so in recent times) in other Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia. In Australia, roasts increasingly feature on the menus of cafes and restaurants, designed to cater to British backpackers. Jigg's dinner is a variation found in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

Typical elements

Typical meats used for a Sunday roast are beef, chicken, lamb or pork, although seasonally duck, goose, gammon, turkey or (rarely) other game may be used. Recently, vegetarian alternatives such as Quorn or nut roast have also become available. These are some of the common traditional accompaniments to various meats (although many people combine different types of accompaniments, or mix and match foods):

• roast beef — served with Yorkshire pudding; and horseradish sauce, or English mustard as accompaniments.
• roast pork — served with crackling and sage and onion stuffing; apple sauce and English mustard as accompaniments.
• roast lamb — mint sauce or redcurrant jam as an accompaniment.
• roast chicken — served with pigs in blankets, chipolata sausages and stuffing, bread sauce, cranberry sauce or redcurrant jelly

Sunday roasts can be served with a range of boiled and roast vegetables. The Sunday Roast is perhaps one of the last meals where this tradition survives. The vegetables served vary seasonally and regionally, but this will usually include roast potatoes of some type, which have been roasted in meat drippings (or more recently, due to the unhealthy nature of saturated fats, vegetable and olive oils), and also a gravy made from stock cubes and sometimes with some sort of animal based roux, or non-animal based corn flour (though in the past soups were made and thickened using animal based broths and stocks). Other vegetable dishes served with roast dinner can include mashed swede, turnips, roast parsnips, boiled or steamed cabbage, broccoli, various green beans, sliced boiled carrots and peas. In the West Country, it is common in both pubs and homes for leftovers from prepared vegetable dishes - such as cauliflower cheese or stewed red cabbage - to be served alongside the more usual assortment of plainly-cooked seasonal vegetables. It takes a considerable amount of domestic cooking skill and experience to have all the elements, with their separate cooking and preparation methods and timings, ready together to serve at their best.

Sometimes, the left-over meat was used to make Shepherd's pie, or if there are vegetables left, then a bubble and squeak.

Sunday Roast in pubs and restaurants

Many pubs in Britain serving food have a special "Sunday menu" that features a Sunday Roast, usually with a variety of meats available, and this is often cheaper than the normal menu.

See also: Pub grub and Carvery

British Trends

In recent years, the appearance of news programmes in the Sunday lunchtime slot in British television schedules has resulted in the term Sunday Roast being used to describe a searching — and sometimes abrasive — interview of a leading politician. This usage is based on a modern interpretation of the words roast or grill to mean a barrage of difficult questions.