A fortnight after the clocks went back, the afternoons close in by half four, and that is exactly when the roast comes into its own. It is called a Sunday roast for the plainest of reasons: for generations, Sunday was the one day most households stopped work, and the week's best piece of meat was cooked and eaten together. The rest of the story, involving bakers' ovens, batter puddings, eighteenth-century patriotism and, eventually, the pub, is rather better than the name suggests.
Why is it called a Sunday roast?
Strip away the gravy and the answer is about time and money. For most working families across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, meat was expensive and the working week long. Sunday was the day of rest and of church, so it was the day when there was both the leisure to cook something substantial and a reason to sit down as a household. A single large joint, bought once a week, became the centrepiece. The meal took its name from the day because the day was what made it possible.
Roast beef in particular carried more than nutritional weight. By the eighteenth century it had become a kind of national emblem: Henry Fielding's song The Roast Beef of Old England dates from the 1730s, and Hogarth borrowed the title for a painting in 1748. The French, never slow to notice, have called the English les rosbifs ever since. The Sunday joint was ordinary household cooking, but it was ordinary cooking with a flag on it.
The Sunday joint and the baker's oven
Here is the detail that makes the tradition feel real. Plenty of urban households, especially in crowded industrial towns and cities, had no oven big enough to roast a joint, or no oven at all. Bakers, meanwhile, did not bake bread on Sundays, but their great brick ovens held their heat long after the fires went out. The widely recounted arrangement was simple: on the way to church, families dropped their meat at the local bakery, often sitting in a tin over a dish of potatoes, and collected it cooked on the way home, for a small fee.
Picture the street around midday: a queue of people at the bakery door, each carrying home a tin wrapped in a cloth, the smell drifting up the terrace. It is one of those customs that survives mostly in memory and family anecdote, so treat the finer details as folk history rather than gospel, but the logic of it is sound and it turns up again and again in accounts of working-class life.
Nor did the joint end on Sunday. A good piece of meat was meant to stretch. Cold cuts appeared on Monday, leftover vegetables were fried up into bubble and squeak, and the last scraps of beef or lamb went into pies, hashes and minced dishes as the week wore on. The Sunday roast was less a single meal than the first instalment of a week's cooking.
Where Yorkshire pudding comes in
The origins of Yorkshire pudding are documented better than most food legends. Cooks in the north of England had long set a batter beneath meat roasting on a spit, so that the fat and juices dripping from the joint fell straight into it. A recipe for a "dripping pudding" appears in a cookery book of 1737, The Whole Duty of a Woman, and a decade later Hannah Glasse's hugely popular The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) printed it under the name that stuck: Yorkshire pudding.
The early versions were flatter and denser than the risen, crisp-edged things we know now. Traditionally the pudding was served on its own, with gravy, before the meat. The usual explanation is thrift: fill everyone up on cheap batter and the expensive joint goes further. It is a plausible story and a much-repeated one, though it is the sort of tale best told with a slight raise of the eyebrow. Either way, many families in Yorkshire still swear by eating it first.
From the family table to the pub
For a long time, Sunday lunch was something you did at home and the pub was where the men went for a pint while it cooked. That changed gradually through the twentieth century. Pub food broadened, the carvery arrived, and by the closing decades of the century a cooked Sunday lunch had become a staple on pub menus across the country.
The real turn came with the gastropub movement of the 1990s, when cooks began taking over London pubs and serving food that would not have embarrassed a restaurant, without losing the bar, the beer or the informality. The roast was a natural fit. It is generous, seasonal and built for long tables, and it gave people a reason to go out on the one day of the week that had traditionally kept them in. Today, for a great many Londoners with small kitchens and smaller ovens, the pub roast is the Sunday roast, which is a neat echo of those families queuing at the baker's door.
What makes a good pub roast today
Everyone has opinions about this, and here are ours. A roast is a simple meal, which is precisely why the details are so easy to get wrong.
- Roast potatoes that have actually been roasted. Crunchy, craggy outsides, fluffy middles, cooked in proper fat. Pale, steamed-tasting wedges are a deal-breaker.
- Real gravy. Made from the roasting juices, not poured from a vat of brown paste. You should be able to taste the meat it came from.
- A Yorkshire with some ambition. Crisp at the edges, soft at the base, and freshly made rather than reheated into leather. Nobody minds a Yorkshire with beef; plenty of people want one with everything.
- Vegetables treated with respect. Seasonal, cooked with care and not boiled into submission. Autumn is the best time of year for this: roots, greens and squash are at their peak.
- A vegetarian option that isn't an afterthought. A roast is a whole plate, not just the meat. The meat-free main should get the same potatoes, the same care and a gravy of its own.
- A room worth lingering in. The best roasts are slow affairs. Now the evenings draw in early, look for a pub with a fire, a snug or a corner table where nobody hurries you out.
That last point matters more than it sounds. The roast was always about stopping for a few hours, and a handsome old room does half the work; our tour of London's finest historic pub interiors is a good place to hunt for one. And if your Sunday starts with a long, muddy walk, there is no better ending, provided you have read up on dog etiquette for autumn pub visits first.
Booking a roast in London this season
Roast season is also the busiest stretch of the pub calendar. From November, Sunday tables fill quickly, and the festive party trade starts squeezing capacity at many pubs too. A few practical habits help:
- Book ahead, especially for larger groups or for the popular early-afternoon sittings.
- Confirm Sunday kitchen hours with the pub directly: many serve roasts only until a set time, and when it's gone, it's gone.
- Ask about the vegetarian and dietary options when you book rather than at the table.
- If you can, go late. A three o'clock roast that drifts into dusk by the fire is the whole point of the season.
The joint no longer goes to the baker, and few of us eat cold beef on Monday out of necessity. But the shape of the thing is unchanged since Hannah Glasse's day: one generous meal, one day off, and enough time at the table to forget about the week ahead.
