Róisín Ingle: Dissecting my 84-year-old’s mother’s love life over Sunday lunch

It’s Food Month in The Irish Times, no better time to tell you about the afternoon when six of us went out in Dublin town for a Sunday roast. The party included my mother Ann and my friend, let’s call him Dave, who lives abroad but had recently arrived home for a last-minute, spur-of-the-moment holiday.

Dave won’t mind me saying that his cooking skills are limited. He’s best known for a dish he calls pasta surprise. Any dish with “surprise” in the title should come with a health warning. Back in the 1980s, Ann was known to make a dish called Indian Whiting Surprise. She found the recipe on a Bord Iascaigh Mhara leaflet. In addition to the whiting, the dish contained chunks of tinned pineapple and cheese: Surprise!

At 8.10am the day after he arrived back in Dublin, Dave texted: “I really fancy going out for a Sunday roast”. I spent the next few hours inquiring by text about what time he might like the roast and where he might like to go for the roast. I rang him several times for good measure. No sign of Dave. In the meantime, we called around for my mother to take her for a Sunday spin in the car with promises of a roast. I did think, briefly, of making the meal myself but feeling too lazy decided to research the best Sunday roasts in the capital.

The research was important. My mother and I have been badly stung before. The last time we went out for a Sunday roast a few years ago the Yorkshire puddings were a terrible disappointment. As we sat reading the menu, we could see them already made, squat, dry, forlorn-looking things, resting under a lamp on the serving counter. By the time our meals arrived, the Yorkshires were as hard as bullets. I grew up with an English mother, who took Yorkshire puddings extremely seriously – as a culinary endeavour. If a restaurant can’t deliver a Yorkie fresh from the oven as big as your head and as crispy on the outside as they are fluffy on the inside, then they shouldn’t bother with them is our opinion on the matter. I booked a restaurant that looked promising. We hoped for the best.

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Dave eventually texted back. He’d sent the message about wanting a Sunday roast and then promptly fallen back into a deep, jet-lagged sleep. The jet lag was also blamed for him being 20 minutes late for the lunch but now the six of us were gathered around a table excited about the roast. There was a bit of business to attend to first. The surrendering of mobile phones. We had decided to hand our phones over to my mother. What a novelty. Nobody getting out their phone to take pictures of the food, or to google the name of an actor they couldn’t remember, or to answer a text or show everyone a video that nobody really wanted to see anyway. Is it actually possible, in this day and age, to have a phone-free lunch? It is, it turns out, and I can highly recommend the experience.

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It pains me to report the Yorkshires were terrible. The roast potatoes were not much better. The lovely service and some great, rare roast beef made up for Yorkshire-related disappointment. As did the phone-free banter. We talked about the musical Carousel and because nobody had phones to check the songs somebody decided one of the tunes was “life is a Carousel, old chum, come to the Carousel” mixing it up with Cabaret. Ann did not need her phone to remember that she was 17 when the film came out in 1956 and how in later years when she was married, one of the songs sang to her on a deep level. “Oh, what’s the use of wond’ring, If he’s good or if he’s bad? He’s your feller and you love him. That’s all there is to that,” she crooned at the table remembering her own fella, my father, who was good and sometimes bad.

Towards the end of the meal, my mother revealed that an old flame, let’s call him Seán, was back in touch having let her down badly back when she was a more sprightly widow in her 60s with better eyesight and fewer aches and pains. It was a fine romance until one evening she made a stew for Seán’s dinner and he never arrived to eat it. She sat waiting for him all night, but he never showed. Perhaps he’d been in an accident, she thought as the stew congealed. She found out later, not from him, that Seán had gone back to his ex-wife.

Seán, like my mother, is now in his 80s. He lives alone on the side of the hill in Co Tipperary. My mother has softened towards him. “He rang to say he wants to take me on a cruise,” my mother told us. Dave, although late for the lunch and late to respond to my messages, now came into his brilliant own. “Tell him that your feelings for him are as cold as the stew he never arrived to eat,” he said. “Tell him you can’t go on the cruise because that ship has sailed.” We laughed, feeling sort of sorry for Seán, thinking of the good and the bad in him, and what he might be having for Sunday lunch.