Sunday 29 May 2011

For my Nanna, and her legendary Sunday Lunch

What I love about food, about eating, are the memories we get from it. I'm sat watching Formula 1 with hubs and all I can smell is my nanna's Sunday Roast; I can small the roast beef (always roast beef), the gravy that I've never been able to replicate, the perfect roast potatoes that my cousin and I used to call cheesy potatoes - they weren't of course, but somehow they used to taste that way. I remember, as we all took our seats, the once over I'd give mine and my cousins plates to make sure she didn't have more than me, my Uncle Clive pouring out the beer to make a shandy, and my cousin and I being able to have the weakest shandy ever known, but we felt so grown up! The saxa salt and pepper on the table is the reason I always, without fail, have to have white pepper shaken over my mashed potatoes. And the sound of the cars on the TV, it seemed like every weekend but of course it wasn't, as clear in my memory as it is in my living room.

Lunch was served at 2pm, without fail. My cousin Jane always mashed the potatoes, Uncle Clive always had the end of the meat but of course, my nanna always, always had the final say on who got what and when. Sunday Roast ran like clockwork,

Fast forward 10, 12 years. My wonderful, warm nanna who made the best Sunday Lunch was all of a sudden at my childhood home on a Sunday, being cooked for by my mum and dad after a fall in the kitchen, which soon led to dementia which soon led to her passing away. It was at this point I began to realise how good my mum's Sunday Roast was. Was it because the torch had been passed, almost, as she cooked for my dad's mum? Was it because my mum, like me, the black sheep of the family, took it upon herself to look after my nanna the way my nanna looked after us, by getting the family together and feeding us our Sunday Lunch? Or was it always that good but I never knew, so certain I was that my nanna was the best?

I don't know, but as I listen to the cars whizzing around the track in Monaco, I'm sat with a lump in my throat as I think of my nanna and her legendary Sunday lunches, looking back at the eight year old me and the cousins I no longer know, smelling the mashed potatoes, roast beef and gravy all covered with pepper. So I'm off now to make roast beef and yorkshire puddings, and I can because I watched my nanna in her pinny working her magic and learnt from her. This lunch is for my nanna. We miss you x

2 comments:

  1. Lovely post hun, bought a tear to my eye. I'm sure your Sunday Roast is as good as your Nanna's - sounds like she helped give you a love of cooking from an early age xx

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