The Sunday roast was once the most common feature of English cooking. The Sunday dinner traditionally includes roast potatoes (or boiled or mashed potatoes) accompanying a roasted joint of meat such as roast beef, lamb, pork, or a roast chicken and assorted other vegetables, themselves generally boiled and served with a gravy or roasted with the meat in its juices, which are then used as or added to the gravy. Sauces and jellies are chosen depending on the type of meat: horseradish or various mustards for beef, mint sauce or mint or redcurrant jelly for lamb, apple sauce for pork, and cranberry sauce for turkey. Yorkshire pudding normally accompanies beef (although traditionally served in Yorkshire, as a starter, from the days when meat was scarce so was served first as a "filler"), sage and onion stuffing pork, and usually parsley stuffing chicken; gravy is now often served as an accompaniment to the main course.
The practice of serving a roast dinner on a Sunday is related to the elaborate preparation required, and to the housewife's practice of performing the weekly wash on a Monday, when the cold remains of the roast made an easily assembled meal. Sunday was once the only rest day after a six-day working week; it was also a demonstration that the household was prosperous enough to afford the cost of a better than normal meal.
An elaborate version of the roast dinner is traditionally eaten at Christmas, with almost every detail rigidly specified by tradition. Since its widespread availability after World War II the most popular Christmas roast is turkey, superseding the goose of Dickens's time. Before the period of cheap turkeys, roast chicken would be more common than goose although chicken was still a once a year treat until the 1950s, goose being unsuitable for small groups of diners. Game meats such as venison which were traditionally the domain of higher classes are occasionally also eaten by those wishing to experiment with a wider choice of foods, due to their promotion by celebrity chefs, although they are not usually eaten frequently in the average household, however rabbit and pigeon, whether poached or domestically reared, were once staple sources of protein for the working classes.