Sunday lunch

All meals were eaten in this kitchen/living room using the oddest collection of cutlery and crockery.   Grandma had some lovely crockery but that was for best.  It came out very occasionally.  (I feel a little sad that she had a full tea service which she used only twice in seventy years for fear of breaking it.)  Grandma was an excellent cook but the range of meals was very limited by today’s standards.  We always had a roast on Sunday; most often it was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.  The vegetables would be from the large garden so of course we ate seasonally.  Somebody would be detailed to fetch some horseradish in.  This is very pungent and provokes far more tears than onions but it was finely grated and mixed with cream to make horseradish sauce.  Pudding was always a fruit pie and grandma had a wonderful light hand with the pastry so with rich cream from the farm it was a dish fit for a king.

The rule of the house was everyone had to have a little of everything.  That way we learned to be adventurous in our food choices and it was thought very rude to say you didn’t like something.  All adults in the family were agreed on this policy. 

One day grandma made a rhubarb pie.  Just in case any non-Brits are not familiar with rhubarb I’ll just say that it has a very “tangy” flavour or to be honest, it can be very sour so is sweetened with brown sugar in pies.  My grandfather had a very sweet tooth and didn't like rhubarb so he served everyone but not himself.  He was very much an old fashioned man, master of the house, but we children were not going to let him get away with that one.  We had all eaten swede and Brussel sprouts so as far as we were concerned he had to eat rhubarb and, despite warning noises from grandma and our parents, we told him so.  Bless his heart he thought it hilarious, cut himself a substantial slice, smothered it with cream and downed the lot.