'Nobody needs a deconstructed roast with 12 little components and a smear of gravy. Keep it generous, keep it recognisable and make every element really bloody good'

Sunday lunch: accept no substitute. ‘It really is the captain’s table at the end of a long week,’ declares chef Richard Corrigan of a weekly tradition he still vigorously upholds. ‘Beef is the king. The mere mention of a roast in the oven sends the kids scurrying up the hill for a late lunch. I will always cherish it — I think it is the most beautiful expression of living and eating and it’ll never change at my table.’

Corrigan is not alone in his wistful, romantic adoration; the Sunday roast remains sacrosanct on these shores. Still, rarely do two plates look the same. Disagreements abound over precisely what should make the cut. Everyone seemingly agrees on roast potatoes, even if — in Sunday-lunch terms, at least — they’re a modern addition, not becoming a staple of the British diet until the early 19th century. Regardless, they need to be right.

‘Soggy potatoes are a definite no-no; they need to be crisp roasties, every time,’ maintains Sally Abé of Teal in east London. ‘Good gravy is absolutely non-negotiable,’ adds Saturday Kitchen chef Elliott Grover. ‘Proper roasting juices, with plenty of depth and enough of it — there’s nothing worse than being precious with the gravy.’ What about the famous Yorkshire puddings? ‘Absolutely essential with every roast in my opinion,’ offers Abé. Chef and restaurateur Jason Atherton isn’t so convinced. ‘Yorkies should only ever be with beef,’ he counters firmly. The jury’s out.

Of the meat itself? Anything goes. The crucial thing is to get the condiments right. ‘Homemade horseradish is the only thing to go with beef,’ believes Corrigan. ‘Mustard goes well, too,’ notes Abé. Grover suggests ‘mint sauce with lamb, apple sauce with pork,’ before advising, ‘Nobody needs a deconstructed roast with 12 little components and a smear of gravy. Keep it generous, keep it recognisable and make every element really bloody good.’

Thus: meat, potatoes, veg and gravy. The same as it’s been for decades — or is it centuries? In a country founded on the bedrock of myth and legend, it feels apt that one of our most beloved meals should emerge from a shroud of folklore. The story of the Sunday roast is not the pub tale landlords winkingly deliver to tourists of a meal originating with medieval peasants on their way to church laden with a joint. In this yarn, before settling down for the priest’s sermon, the peasants would give the meat to the local baker to cook with potatoes and vegetables in still-hot bread ovens, collecting it on the way home to share at the family table. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that it’s true.

Neither did the roast emerge from the greed of the ceremonial guards at the Tower of London. Established as the Yeoman Warders by Henry VII in 1485, their Beefeater nickname is often flimsily cited as proof of the nation’s ancient devotion to beef on the weekends. Some insist the roast goes back far further, to Sundays in the fields, where workers would roast an ox and feast on cuts chiselled right off the carcass.

What is known is that, although the meal took time to find its shape, Sundays have long been kept as a day of rest. This observance wasn’t left entirely to the Church: in 1444, a law emerged in London prohibiting professional cooks from boiling, baking and roasting on Sunday mornings. Still, it’s unlikely that medieval peasants were getting much in the way of roasted meat, given the process then was extravagant and time-consuming, requiring cuts to be cast on a spit and turned constantly beside a fire to ensure the skin didn’t blister as the inside stayed raw (the instant-barbecue conundrum of its day). For most, meat was boiled and stewed, but, even for the wealthy, a roast was an occasion long before it was attached to a Sunday.

However, those earliest spit roasts produced something now considered indispensable — the juices and fat running from the meat. These would collect into a literally named dripping pan beneath the spit, forming the foundations of gravy. Centuries later, Sam and Georgie Pearman, who run the Country Creatures pub group in the Cotswolds, describe essentially the same principle: ‘We make our gravy from scratch, boiling the bones from the carcass, adding all the delicious meat juices and then straining it to create a really rich, flavoursome gravy.’

Slowly, roasting and Sundays began to entwine, perhaps because the time required for the former was only available on the latter. By the 17th century, the diarist Samuel Pepys was coming home after church for ‘a good dinner of roast beef’. The wealthy Pepys’s tastes cannot be taken as an indicator of the broader English diet, but his accounts from the 1660s foreshadow what would be commonplace less than a century later.

By the early 1700s, roast beef had become not only a staple of the British diet, but a totem of national identity. In 1731, English satirist Henry Fielding wrote The Roast Beef of Old England song into The Grub-Street Opera; shortly afterwards, Richard Leveridge took the patriotic lyrics (‘When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food/ It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood’) and put them to a tune that became such a hit that it inspired William Hogarth to paint a picture of the same name. To this day, it is still sung by the Royal Navy before formal mess dinners.

The 18th century not only popularised roast beef, but one of the defining extras: the Yorkshire pudding. Six years after Fielding’s song, ‘dripping pudding’ appeared in the Georgian handbook The Whole Duty of a Woman. A decade later, it was renamed after God’s own country in one of the most successful and influential cookbooks ever printed, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.

The recipe was much then as it is now, with instructions suggesting a pancake-like batter set beneath the meat, so the drippings mixed in. The meat, then, physically created the pudding’s flavour: it was not a side. In fact, sometimes, the Yorkshire was served first and the meat was left to finish. ‘Traditionally, a Yorkshire should be served with the sediment from the beef roasting tray and honey as a starter, while the beef is resting,’ agrees Atherton. ‘My great-grandmother would always do this when we were growing up in the North.’

The pudding seemed to tie the meal together and, during this time, the idea of Sunday lunch firmly took shape as a ritual. Economically, it made sense: one substantial meal could feed a hungry working family, with leftovers stretching into the week. In 1834, Parliament debated Sunday observance, with MPs arguing that the weekly Sunday dinner was crucial to working families, many of whom relied on local bakers to cook it — which is probably where that particular rumour comes from (and makes sense, given that all households having ovens was still a long way off).

In his 1867 collection of essays Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, social commentator Thomas Wright describes Sunday dinner as ‘by a long way the most important culinary affair of the week’. A couple of years before, Mrs Beeton’s Dictionary of Every-Day Cookery showed the Sunday dinner settling into a recognisable form: roast meat, potatoes, vegetables and the appropriate trimmings. Beef came with Yorkshire pudding; elsewhere, her Sunday tables featured roast mutton, lamb, veal and even sucking pig.

By now, the roast was no longer synonymous with beef so much as a way of organising the Sunday meal. Beeton’s roast fowl came with its own established ritual: brown gravy and ‘a tureen of well-made bread sauce’. Here, she was reaching back centuries to the medieval habit of thickening sauces with bread — its pairing with roast poultry would outlast almost all the other sauces made in the same way.

With the dish now firmly a national staple, it is little surprise that products emerged to cut down on labour: soon, there was Paxo stuffing (1901) and Bisto gravy (1908). The public was spared ready-made Yorkshires until Aunt Bessie came along with them in 1995. Roast-dinner devotees are lucky that the Victorians were so keen on them. Two World Wars swept away much of the elaborate domestic machinery of Victorian Britain, but the roast persevered.

Rations during the Second World War certainly threatened its existence, but, in a curious way, reinforced it, too; some house-holds chose to stack up the meat allowance for Sundays only and cherish the roast more than before. Potatoes and other vegetables increasingly filled out the plate to compensate. Meat was the final major food to come off ration, in July 1954, at which point the Sunday roast could finally begin to flourish again. Intensive farming forced the price of chicken down: in 1950, poultry accounted for 1% of the meat eaten in Britain; by 1980, it made up a quarter. Suddenly, beef wasn’t always the headline act.

There were other changes, too. Families shrank, Sundays loosened their mooring lines to the church and overworked parents became less willing or able to surrender an entire morning to getting lunch on the table. Pubs increasingly took on the work instead. Corrigan suspects it may be more common to eat out now on a Sunday than tackle the whole thing at home. Perhaps — but what is clear is that the essential idea has proved remarkably difficult to kill.

‘The roast is alive and well,’ asserts Abé. ‘There’s something very timeless about it. As soon as the colder weather arrives, people start craving that comforting Sunday roast again.’ Yorkshires may or may not be permitted and cauliflower cheese will always be a point of contention, but the reason for gathering around it has altered remarkably little.

This article first appeared in the October 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.