Roast beef sandwiches

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is strict about the making of something as seemingly simple as a cold roast beef sandwich. "Do yourself a favour", he warns in his Meat Book, "and follow these instructions to the letter". He is right. I don’t have the book in front of me as I write, but I will do my best. This is good food for a Christmas Day secret late night supper.

INGREDIENTS

Slices of cold rare roast beef.

Slices of bread.

Butter.

Real mayonnaise.

Fresh horseradish if you have it; tarragon mustard or ordinary Dijon mustard if not.

Slices of lettuce.

Sea salt.

Black pepper.

METHOD

Butter both slices of bread. Spread mayonnaise on one slice and horseradish or mustard on the other. Pave the horseradishy bread with beef, followed by a grinding of salt and pepper. Lay the lettuce on top followed by the mayonnaised bread. Slice and eat.

Babylonian food

The author E. Nesbit was a joint founder of the Fabian Society. Thus it was that she knew my great grandparents. I encountered her only in her fiction. “The Story of the Amulet” was and is a favourite. The children in the book make visits from the present (1905) to the past: one of their journeys is to a city so ancient that there is disagreement among scholars as to where its ruins are to be found. Babylon. Here is an account of the children eating with the Queen.

“She just ate with her fingers, and as the first dish was a great tray of boiled corn, and meat and raisins all mixed up together, and melted fat poured all over the tray, it was found difficult to follow her example with anything like what we are used to think of as good table manners. There were stewed quinces afterwards, and dates in syrup, and thick yellowy cream. It was the kind of dinner you hardly ever get in Fitzroy Street.”

Somehow the reference to Fitzroy Street makes the whole thing the more real. And Nesbit has already described the kind of food that is eaten in Fitzroy Street, a mutton chop, for instance: “as it lay on the plate it looked like a brown island in the middle of a frozen pond, because the grease of the gravy had become cold, and consequently white. It looked very nasty...” Something of a contrast to the Babylonian food which is to come.