Sunday Roast: The Complete Guide to Cooking and Carving

Combining the cooking flair of Two Fat Ladies’ Clarissa Dickson Wright and the knife–wielding skills of Johnny Scott, this recipe–laden book shows you how to perfectly roast and carve meat, poultry, game, and fish.

Traditional English cooking has few such staunch advocates as Clarissa Dickson Wright. The surviving half of television's "Two Fat Ladies" has teamed up with Johnny Scott to create Sunday Roast, a guide to carving meat. Wright and Scott show readers how to become masters of the carving knife and fork. But before attacking just about any cut of meat publicly, one first needs a suitably prepared roast on which to demonstrate one's skills. So Wright and Scott provide recipes to ensure the perfect cooking of a beef rib roast, adding complementary flavorings to the meats. Their carving diagrams show how to follow both the meat's grain and its bony anatomy to ensure perfectly presentable slices. (Many readers may wish the authors had gone into greater detail with the diagrams.) In addition to dissecting assorted beef roasts, Wright and Scott describe how to carve all manner of poultry, game, and even larger fish such as turbot. They offer as well a few recipes for vegetables and similar side dishes. A decidedly English guide, this volume may not appeal to all Americans because its photographs expose the English penchant for overcooking meat. The authors' unremitting and uncompromising use of British terminology also sounds obscure to the American ear, tracklements and gammon being but a few. A group of recipes for using leftovers offers sound advice on dealing with the ends and scraps left over from carving. Connoisseurs may be surprised to learn that Yorkshire Christmas pie, with its bird-in-bird layers (six, from pigeon to turkey), predates Paul Prudhomme's much-celebrated turducken. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved