MY LIFE AS A FOODIE
TEXT
CHARITY KEITA
SUNDAY
ROAST
CLUB
It was the British who inspired Charity Keita
to up her stakes in the food department.
She still thanks them for this to this day.
I
started getting competitive
about food while living in
Norfolk, where I was finishing my
bachelor’s degree. My friends
were from a mostly international
crowd and everybody loved to
sit around and talk about what
atrociously bad food the English
ate and cooked. I knew that there
was a seed of truth to the griping
but felt that we were overlooking
something. Soggy fish and chips,
suspect sausages, mushy peas and
steaks served at pubs which for
some reason always tasted of goat,
could not be the beginning and end
of English cuisine. Although I had
had a few truly shocking meals in
people’s homes, vegetables boiled
to within an inch of existence, roast
beef that was grey on the inside and
the all pervasive Bisto instant gravy
granules that people seemed to
love to drench their flavourless food
in, there had to be something I was
missing.
Then one day my friend Will
found an old book which detailed
what Queen Victoria used to have
for breakfast. I’ll never forget the
huge list of amazing delicacies that
used to grace this late sovereign’s
breakfast table: from ducks stuffed
with poussin chickens, to suckling
pigs, juicy lamb shanks and cuts of
beef big enough to feed an army, this
truly was a flesh-tastic smorgasbord.
Unfortunately, I have never found
the book again and no amount
of googling “what Queen Victoria
had for breakfast” has successfully
redirected me to this breakfast
menu of hers. But that was the day
that something in me clicked. If
we couldn’t find good English food
in pubs, fish and chip shops and
people’s homes, well maybe we
could just make some ourselves?
In fact why didn’t we start a club
that pushed us to make amazing
English food competitively? And
what better English fare than their
famous Sunday Roast, a dish that if
prepared badly is surely a one way
road to constipation but which holds
great promise if put into the right
hands?
My motley crew of Italian, Nigerian,
British and Libyan friends jumped
at the opportunity and for a time
Sunday became the most anticipated
day of the week. We even had a
cookery book into which everyone
had to pen their creations and a blog,
which mainly served the purpose of
putting each other’s food down and
being silly.
People’s creations tried to stick
to the English path but sometimes
they strayed a bit. Nonetheless
each and every one of those roasts
brought out what we felt was the
Why didn’t we
start a club that
pushed us to
make amazing
English food
competitively?
true essence of what the idea behind
English food was, and helped build
our confidence in the food revolution
that was at that point getting into full
swing on those wet isles.
Fast forward almost a decade
and my friends have all gone their
separate ways and the tradition of
the Sunday Roast Club is only relived
in our memories. Sometimes though
I get nostalgic and think back to the
birth of my competitive foodie days
and we decide to cook a proper
Sunday Roast, to feel closer to the
place that hosted me for the better
part of a decade.
I am trying to convince Luan to
make one such roast for Easter. I
want him to make it Portuguese but
with an English twist. Obviously it
will include Portuguese mainstays
like pork, bacallhau (salt cod) and the
all pervasive feijoada (bean soup).
More on this soon.
19.