Let’s Be Honest, Roast Dinners Are Just Fucking Awful

The thing about this kind of article is that before you've even clicked on the link you've decided what it's all about, what you think about it, whether you agree with it or not, how much of a cunt I am for saying it – the list goes on. And in some ways, you'd be right. What is the point of being effusively derisory about a culinary national treasure? Whom does it serve? Surely it's just a piece of clickbait designed wholly to momentarily incense the roast-loving public, an unnecessary polemic on this widely enjoyed national dish? Sure, why not. But also, I feel personally attacked whenever I am forced to eat one of these things. A roast isn't just a bad dish, it's also a socially problematic emblem of anxiety, awkwardness, shame and guilt. Allow me to demonstrate.

The problem with roasts is the same problem with the majority of British food: it's bullshit. There is a reason that this country is internationally renowned for having bad food. Even the Americans, whose palette is as sophisticated as that of a new-born mountain goat, laugh at us and our assorted brown and beige sludge. The majority of our national dishes are born from struggle. This is the case in many other countries too, but here we've woven in the omnipresent melancholy of British life. Everything makes you feel uncomfortably full. It's stuffing yourself so you don't have to eat again for a couple of days. Though no one seems able to agree on how roasts came about, the general idea is that non-aristocrats would have to hand slabs of meat over to the local baker, to cook in a bigger oven while the family was at church. The origin of this meal is homes where fireplaces couldn't even accommodate a cut of beef. Misery.

I don't like roasts for the same reason I don't like jacket potatoes: I don't believe in meals that you have to put shit on to make them edible. Gravy as a concept is fine, but its importance to the very fabric of the roast – essentially a load of component parts cooked in the most basic way possible – is embarrassing. Somehow the dish relies on a brown goo of flavour, seeping into the crud on top of the plate of whichever poor sap has chosen to eat it.

Or not chosen to eat it, as the case may be. A big problem with roasts is that they're foisted upon you and the expectation for you to enjoy them is an unnerving social pressure. You don't want to be that picky eater guy who complains about everything all the time, and you don't want to kill everyone's joy, but goddammit do you want to eat anything besides that sad collection of unseasoned vegetables and meat. Because roasts are such a large part of both familial British culture and regular social culture, you immediately become persona non grata on announcing your hate for them. You're now a troublemaker, a rabble rouser, a nuisance. How could you not like this treasured, important national dish? Get out of my house, they'll say. And don't come back.

The dislike for roasts is often attributed to having "never had a good one". This is more often than not posited by northerners, who see themselves as the Michel Roux Jrs of this slop, and get wildly offended when you insinuate their roasts are inferior. The truth is there are only about three ways to cook this stuff and all of them are pretty similar – it just depends on whether or not you dump it all in a giant Yorkshire pudding.

There is perhaps nothing more offensive than the pub roast, which is almost always an overpriced, dry load of protein that's kept hot under a lamp until you are stupid enough to order it and pay through the nose for it. The worst thing is seeing a crew of lonely provincial expats in city pubs trying to replicate a family environ by eating it together, drinking pints and wine and ignoring the fact that the meat's overdone or the cabbage limp. Absolute peasantry.

Eating roast dinners makes me feel sad, and there's no other way to say that. The enforced sense of togetherness, bonding over this bland gruel, is lost on me – because I'm moping like a fucking child, poking a mushy pile of carrot and swede around my plate. There are so many other things that can make the family tighter, like Cluedo, or guessing which geriatric or maybe dead member of the archaic media elite is next to be arrested on sex offence charges. It doesn't have to be this way, guys. Put down the roasties, they're fucking crap.

@joe_bish

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