Sunday dinner memories

Text 1: The Baker’s Oven, by John Pritchard

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In our house the whole week was arranged around Sunday dinner. We had no oven of our own, so every Sunday morning my mother set the joint, which was generally a small piece of mutton, upon a dish of potatoes, and sent me with it through the streets to the baker’s, who roasted the dinners of half the parish for a penny each. I carried it there as carefully as if it had been the crown jewels.

At half past twelve I fetched it home again, steaming under a cloth, and the smell of it filled the whole stair. My father, who on weekdays came home too tired to speak, would carve it with great ceremony, and we six children watched every slice as if our lives depended upon it. Mother always took the smallest piece and said she was not hungry.

I have dined since at good tables, and eaten better meat than ever came out of that baker’s oven. But I have never tasted anything so good as those Sunday potatoes, crisp at the edges and soaked in fat, eaten with my brothers and sisters about me and my father in his clean shirt at the head of the table.

Text 2: Nan’s Roast, by Chloe Haddad

An original contemporary memoir.

Every Sunday of my childhood, whatever else was happening, we went to Nan’s for a roast. She lived in a terraced house with a kitchen the size of a cupboard, and she cooked for eleven of us in an oven that only worked if you kicked the door. My job, from the age of six, was to carry the gravy boat from the kitchen to the table without spilling it. I treated it like a sacred mission.

By one o’clock the smell of roast potatoes had reached the street. Grandad, who barely said a word all week, would stand up to carve the chicken as though he were conducting an orchestra, and my cousins and I watched to make sure nobody got a bigger piece. Nan always served herself last, a tiny portion, and claimed she had been picking all morning.

I have eaten in some fantastic restaurants since, and I am a decent cook myself. But nothing has ever matched Nan’s roast potatoes, crunchy outside and soft inside, eaten squashed round a table extended with a decorating board, with everyone I loved talking at once.

Both writers describe Sunday dinner in their childhood.

What are the similarities between the writers’ memories of Sunday dinner?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.