Sunday

Yes, I know the dateline says Monday, but I don't care if it's Monday, Wednesday or New Year's Eve, I'm still going to chunter on about Sunday.

Some years ago - and it might still be the case for all I know - a lot of diaries with a week at a view showed the first day of the week as being Sunday and I went along with that. It didn't occur to me then that Saturday and Sunday are lumped together as "the weekend", nor did I think anything of that verse in Genesis: "And on the seventh day He rested". No, for me the week started on Sunday. Of course, that is the case for followers of the Jewish faith. For them, Saturday is the Sabbath, or seventh day.

It is something of an English tradition that the main meal on Sunday consists of a roast, although that is probably not the general practice these days, partly because this has become such a multicultural society and partly because people just can't be bothered. I have undertaken no research into the matter. But for as long as I can remember, my family has stuck with the tradition: roast meat, roast potatoes, two vegetables - and Yorkshire pudding if the meat is beef.

Fifty years ago - even forty and probably thirty years ago - most families ate their main Sunday meal at lunchtime, and it was still called dinner. That was (and still is) a hangover from our old class system when working men needed a good meal after a hard morning's graft and before starting again in the afternoon. The evening meal was called supper. The upper classes always ate lunch (or even luncheon), afternoon tea, and then dinner in the evening. We also ate our Sunday dinner at lunchtime for many years, but at some point - I know not when - we discovered that we preferred to eat in the evening on Sundays as we did during the rest of the week.

Even now we have a joint of roast meat on Sunday evenings. If there are just the two of us, as is usually the case, we eat in the kitchen, but the meat is always put on a carving dish and carved at the table. The roast potatoes are always placed in a dish, although the other vegetables are often served straight from the saucepans. If there is anyone with us, we lay the dining table with a cloth and place mats, and the vegetables appear in serving dishes. And all that even if it is only our daughter with us.

With the Old Bat's arm in plaster, she is unable to undertake the work of producing the Sunday roast and it falls to me to exercise my negligible culinary skills. Fortunately, the OB is at hand to point me in the right direction, although I do know now how to roast potatoes and for how long to cook them. Last week, we decided - well, the OB decided - we would have a gammon joint from the freezer. I was instructed as to whereabouts in the freezer I would find said joint and duly looked in the appropriate bag. There were two joints in there, and neither had the usual label as produced by the OB, although one did have a label from the butcher which read "pork leg". I brought the other joint for Madam's inspection and she said that it was gammon. We cooked it in the usual way for gammon - in a pressure cooker for some time before roasting in the oven for twenty minutes or so. When I removed the meat from the pressure cooker, I thought it looked a little pale but assumed this was the result of the pressure cooking and that it would presumably regain its pink colour in the oven. The OB, however, knew differently.

'That's not gammon,' she declared. 'That's turkey!'

We agreed to put it in the oven for twenty minutes and hope for the best. Meanwhile, I threw away the honey and mustard glaze and the white sauce, and prepared some gravy. The turkey was fine, if a little dry.

Yesterday I cooked the gammon with its honey and mustard glaze, a white sauce, roast potatoes, roast parsnips (from the garden) and cabbage. Followed by tiramisu, but that wasn't home-made: I cheated and bought it. All very good.