Growing up, as I did, in a household with a father as a clergyman, Sunday lunch was always a big occasion in our house. After the morning services, my father would come in and, after a preliminary glass of sherry, we would all sit down to the most important meal of the week. My mother had also been to church and I never quite understood how she managed to co-ordinate church-going and cooking, but multi-tasking was her forte! She was a good cook, as her mother had been before her – good British cooking. I remember Sunday lunches at my grandmother’s house where she made a huge Yorkshire pudding to eat separately before the main course. We have scaled that down a bit these days! A Sunday roast is a good British tradition. We had it on Sunday lunchtime when I was growing up, but nowadays in my family we often have it in the evening so as to get more done during the day! Topped off with a good pudding for dessert, it makes Sunday a special day (on the occasion photographed here I made a plum crumble for dessert, served with custard, using home-grown plums from our tree).
Ingredients:
Beef (preferably topside, can be fresh or frozen, but fresh is best)
Yorkshire puddings (I tend to buy bought these days, but they are easily made with egg and flour)
Potatoes (not new)
Vegetables: cauliflower and leek ‘mash’ – cauliflower florets and 1 sliced leek, boiled up together and then, on serving, puréed with a dash of crème fraiche added.
Carrots – peeled and sliced
Runner beans – we grew our own and had them frozen, chopped into edible slices.
Method:
The beef should come out of the fridge and stand for 10 minutes before being dealt with. Remove from packaging and place into oven tray. Then season with salt (and pepper if liked) and rub in the salt. Place in the centre of a pre-heated oven (180 degrees; fan 160) for approximately 1.5 hours (there is often an indication of how long on the packet depending on the size of your joint). Then prepare the vegetables. The potatoes need peeling and chopping into two parts and boiling in a saucepan until just beginning to soften. They will later be added to the oven tray to finish cooking with the meat. The other vegetables need to be prepared – chopping the carrots and boiling; beans chopped down to suitable size and boiled in water and the cauliflower and leek mash also put onto the boil. They only need to cook for about 20 minutes so don’t start cooking until the meat has been cooking for at least an hour. So about half an hour before the meat is ready, add the potatoes into the pan and cook with the meat for the last half hour. Pour some of the juices that have come out of the meat onto the potatoes to make them brown more easily. If using bought Yorkshire puddings these go in right at the end – they normally don’t need to cook for more than 5 minutes.
Serving:
The meat should come out of the oven 10 minutes before the meal and be lifted onto a serving platter. The roast potatoes should also come out onto (pre-heated) dinner plates. The gravy can then be made in the oven tray – add a dessert tablespoonful of flour and mix into the meat juice. Then when thick, add some previously boiled water to make up a gravy, bring to the boil and pour into a gravy boat to serve. The carrots and beans can simply be drained and served straight onto the dinner plates. Someone needs to carve the meat then into portions. The cauliflower and leek mash should be drained and then mashed up – I use an electric mixer – and a dessertspoonful of crème fraiche added. All is then co-ordinated onto the dinner plates and served with appropriate sauces, in this case horseradish is the traditional accompaniment to beef. The dessert (in this case the plum crumble) can be made well in advance and be brought out of the oven just as the main course is being served so that it is not too hot when it comes to time to eat it. The custard can be made between courses – custard powder and milk is fine and we tend to use the microwave for speed! For busy academics it is good to have a meal that is a real treat and yet does not take too much time to cook and is uncomplicated! Bon appetit!
About the cook
Katharine Dell is Reader in Old Testament Literature and Theology and Fellow and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies, St Catharine's College. Her favourite food-related quote is : "Life is a minestrone, served up with parmesan cheese; Life is a cold lasagna, suspended in deep freeze" (10 CC)
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