Admit it, roast dinners are bad

Sunday lunch is a bit like the Edinburgh festival. People make a big thing of it, it’s considered a British treasure, and I am meant to book it, go to it, and like it. But I don’t. If Edinburgh is forever associated in my mind with glowering edifices of grim dark stone, hostile chilly sun between spells of overcast cold skies, the worst comedy and theatre I have ever seen, and paying a king’s ransom for a nasty little room a 20-minute taxi ride out of town, then Sunday lunch is, for me, forever intertwined with desperately wishing to be somewhere, anywhere else. Maybe even the Edinburgh festival.

Sunday lunch is what people traditionally do when they don’t much like each other, or at least don’t know how to talk to each other. That’s why it’s such a stalwart of the British family. It’s also the lynchpin of British friendships, where everyone schleps out to the pub to see their ‘mates’ but, once the buzz of the first glass or two wears off, wishes they were on the sofa with Netflix instead – toddlers included.

At home, it’s a more intense misery. The focus is on timing the potatoes for perfect crispiness, considered of vital importance when all naturalness of intimacy is out of the question. Nothing could be more depressing than the sheer dedication to ensuring that a meat slab, unappetising greens, soft carrots, gravy, and Yorkshires are always present and correct. Sunday dinner takes five times as long to prepare as most families like to spend eating it.

If this sounds too harsh, let’s back up and look at the food itself – the dreaded roast dinner. The roast is the last close relation to the school dinner left in British cuisine. School dinners might be avoidable, but why do we still court the Sunday roast? Despite decades of high-voltage celebrity chef culture, only a few have dared to break from the mould. Yotam Ottolenghi and Claudia Roden helped light the way for Middle Eastern flavours, and now chefs like Sabrina Ghayour, Selin Kiazim, and Yossi Elad bring Persian, Turkish, and Israeli influences. But the big names – Nigel, Ainsley, Jamie, Gordon, Nigella, Delia, Rick, and co. – still peddle English cooking that boils down, come Sunday, into the dreariest of national meals.

There are more reasons to throw Sunday lunch in the bin. Its timing – on Sundays – is a big one. Anyone who’s been to school will feel in their bones the inherent dreariness of Sundays. The evenings are terrible, but the moment the winter sun draws in might be the worst. Sundays are, of course, far heavier with dread in winter because that’s when school drags on and on. Even as a grown-up, there’s little pleasure in sitting down to a heavy load of fat, salt, and meat, drinking red wine you don’t want, eating roast potatoes you don’t want, while the fat of the gravy congeals on the plates and afternoon fades into evening – and the next day is Monday.

Then there’s how you feel before: hungover and heavy, or light and hungry, depending on the kind of night (and breakfast) you’ve had. And how you feel after: even fatter, with indigestion. Either way, you end up feeling worse, physically and mentally, due to the cloying social nature of the event.

Sunday lunch squats on the face of your day. You enter it when you’d be most productive and emerge from it with the same pile of bills and admin tasks hanging over you – except now you feel like you’ve been attacked by a social and gastronomical sledgehammer.

Ultimately, if the Sunday lunch is carved from the same depressing stuff as Sundays, the Christian Sabbath of old, then they’re also bound to the heavy block of the family itself. Families can be wonderful, but many are dreadful. Read any number of memoirs or talk to people about their childhoods, and you’ll hear memories of family that are truly grim – where that vaunted unit is little more than a framework for physical abuse, emotional violence, conflict, blame, and fear. Tales of families from the rough 19th or early 20th centuries paint a picture so oppressive, you wonder how anyone survived it – let alone went on to have families of their own.

In 2024, most Sunday lunches aren’t marked by the barely suppressed violence of the old-school patriarchal family. But they remain a terrible tradition – depressing in taste, heft, and colour. A quick fix might be moving them to Saturdays, but even that, I fear, wouldn’t be enough.