Toast

Sunday Roast

The kitchen at York House is in its usual Sunday chaos. Through the clank of pans, I can hear the crackle and spit of roast beef coming from the Aga. My father is in the greenhouse, doing whatever it is that middle-aged men in greenhouses do. Through the hatch I can see steam, which means Mother is draining the beans. Beads of condensation cover the leaded windows. The odd trickle forms pools on the window ledge.

York House is a solid, half-timbered family house, built for new money, with its warren of utility room, scullery, greenhouse and downstairs lavatory. Fashion has it that multicoloured venetian blinds now hang at the leaded-light windows. The garden is somewhat typical of the time; its neat lawn broken by three apple trees with daffodils at the base of their trunks. A majestic willow hangs over the pond and there is a long and winding path around the back. There are bluebells along there, and here and there clouds of London pride.

Roasts are done in the Aga in the main kitchen, vegetables (beans, peas, carrots) on the cream Belling in the scullery. The output from the hottest of the Aga’s two hotplates often disappears at the crucial moment. Sunday lunch is almost guaranteed to bring out a sudden drop in temperature. My father says it has something to do with the hot-water supply.

Right now the scullery is hot enough to melt lead. Though to be fair most of the heat is being given off by my mother, who finds Sunday lunch a meal too many. Her hatred of it is pure and unhidden. She starts to twitch about it on Saturday afternoon. The beef, the potatoes, the beans, the carrots, the gravy, oh God the gravy. Horseradish sauce may or may not appear. It is my father who looks after the twiddly bits, the mustard, ‘horserubbish’ and the Yorkshire pudding – which he makes in an old roasting tin, one huge pudding, which he cuts into podgy squares. He doesn’t do the gravy, but I suspect we all wish he would.

He has a thing about carving the roast. It is like he imagines he clubbed the animal to death and dragged it home through the snow like a caveman with a mammoth. Not to carve the Sunday joint would be an admission to not being quite a man.

How this equates with his love of salmon-pink begonias is another matter.

Heinz Sponge Pudding

Part of the inevitability of Sunday lunch was Heinz Sponge Pudding. I savoured every last crumb, be it raspberry jam, ginger, sultana or chocolate. The last two were what I hoped for when I found the kitchen fugged up with steam and the sound of the tin rattling in its saucepan. The label would fall off and float in the water. I got to learn which one we were having by the smell. Sweet cardboard tinged with chocolate, dried fruit or ginger. To my nose the jam one just smelled of sweet cardboard. There were days when my mother let the pan boil dry and the beloved sultana sponge would burn in its tin. My father would feign nonchalance. It hid his exasperation at having married a woman who couldn’t boil water.

A Heinz Sponge Pudding serves four. Just. If we were six for lunch we got two puddings, which meant seconds. If there were five of us my mother would say, ‘Oh, one’ll do, I won’t have any.’ But she always would.

We always had cream with our sponge pudding. Nestlé’s from a tin, which allowed us to avoid the heartache of watching Mother try to make custard. The cream, so thick you could stand a spoon up in it, was always scooped out of its shallow, white-and-blue tin into the gravy boat and passed round the table. There was a fight, albeit a silent one, to get to the cream jug before Auntie Fanny. Brought up in a family that had never known cream, she was making up for it now, taking almost half the jugful. You could barely see her slice of pudding under it. ‘Are you sure you’ve got enough cream there, Auntie?’ my brother would say, followed by a glaring scowl from my father. He aimed it at Adrian but it was just as much meant for Auntie Fanny.

It was essential to get the cream before Fanny for another reason. She had a hooked beak of a nose. An Edith Sitwell sort of a nose. And on the end of that beak there was a permanent dewdrop of thin, clear snot. I can never remember her without it, apart from a few seconds after she wiped it with her flowery hanky and tucked it up the sleeve of one of her baby-blue or lemon cardigans.

When she got to the cream first, five pairs of eyes would focus intently on the glistening bud at the end of her nose, everyone willing the shining bead not to drop until she passed the cream jug on to someone else. Except me. I prayed that one day it would happen, and wondered what everyone would do if it did. Would we have to open another tin? Would my father cover Auntie’s embarrassment by just stirring it in and slopping it over his pud? I sat there, my fists clenched in my lap, willing, begging it to happen. I would have relished it. Even more so if no one but me had noticed.

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