Who can still make a Sunday joint last a week?

Sunday lunch was always roast beef and, in the traditional way, the Yorkshire pudding was served first with gravy, supposedly because if you were full of cooked batter you wanted less meat. Monday saw cold meat, jacket potatoes and pickles, while the beef bone went into the pot with lentils, pearl barley, carrots and onions and bubbled on the hob for days, the basis of every dinner until Friday’s fish and Saturday’s sausages and mash, before Sunday came round again. That is what everybody had and, like all housewives, my mother made the most of every morsel. Throughout and after the war, waste was a crime.

I hate cooking and am bad at it for all I learned, by watching, about roasting the potatoes in the hot fat round the meat, and I always helped beat the batter.

There is a point to all this nostalgia. My mother’s generation would not have been fazed by the few food shortages we have had recently, nor did they rely on freezers and microwaves.