I always think of the Sunday Roast Dinner, as 52 practice roast dinners, and 1 perfect Christmas Dinner.  This is why the British are so good at the Roast Dinner.

I actually had a really good traditional English Sunday roast in Oklahoma City. The only problem was the white gravy. Visually challenging but it tasted OK

Pub "carveries" have gone crazy, offering roasts with upto three types of meat (beef, lamb, pork) on the same plate. Traditionally, you just have one type of meat.

You mised a few things like warming the plates before serving and whoever cooks, the other person cleans up. You are normally given your food already plated, and an old rule which our family follows is you never get up from the table unless everyone has finished

Luckily, my family come from Lancashire, so we shun yorkshire pudding and don't have to worry about its etiquette: 'tis from wrong side of t'Pennines.

Just sometimes we used to have our Yorkshires after the meat course with jam or even better with golden syrup.

Beautifully expressed. Mint sauce is great but often so badly made that it may be better to go for chimichurri or salsa verde. Quince sauce is brilliant with roast pork.

What's for afters?

UK dining: Breakfast, elevensies, lunch/dinner, tea time, supper, dinner.
Yorkshire pudding is filled with gravy as a reservoir for your roast. It heats the luke warm turkey to an acceptable temperature.

wrong you can have a Yorkshire pudding with jam on it as well as a few other things as a treat but you also have to remember you could have a joint of zebra, ostrich, crocodile, buffalo or any other roasted meat in a Sunday dinner with any type of veg and a lot of different types of gravy i like my beef cooked in honey and a bit of water and slow roasted for around 5 to 6 hours then i use the juices to make a honey gravy the meat falls to bits and the gravy is bloody lovely

And to add complications, the Scott’s tend to use different terms for meal
I haven’t lived in Scotland for a very long time
But when I did in the 60s and 70s
And this was a traditional from previous decades
Most Scott had high tea, which was a reasonably large meal and eaten  at five or 6 pm in the evening after work
And they would never call that dinner

Yanks and limeys have different dining habits? Who would have thought?

I left yorkshire in 1963 for Africa, then on to Texas. I'm just getting over it. But 2 comments. We would always have the YPs before the meat course, and I would cut fresh mint from my grandparent's garden, chop it up, and add vinegar. Some of it might go onto the YP.
My mother would not let us into the house (on our way back from church) until the YPs were ready, irrespective on the weather. Open the outside door and they would drop.
The 2nd comment is about the amount of beer in a glass. In Yorkshire we buy and drink the beer, not the head. That's a southern thing...

If you are invited for a Sunday Dinner it would be wise to ask what time that meant.

Dinner is normally an Evening meal served between 6 and 9.

However Sunday Dinner could be served at Lunchtime  - between 12 and 3..

Beware, those in the North of England would call Lunch, Dinner.

No idea what they would say the evening meal is called? Obviously not Dinner and Tea is a very light meal served at around 4.

So confused??

I think only a small minority of households have traditional Sunday lunches each week, but only a handful of times a year.  Personally (in London) none of my friends have it, except in pubs maybe 4 times/year.
And many of us use far less gravy, not least because modern relatively-lean meat does not produce much juice, and without that, Bisto is a bit ordinary, and also because we like our roast potatoes and YPs to be crunchy.

Are your temperatures Centigrade or Fahrenheit?

Even in 2026, there is still a lot of class snobbery in the UK
And quite different words used and behaviour by different classes
I think This is dying out. I’m in my 70s but when I was a youngster.
The middle class had dinner in the evening
The working classes had dinner at lunchtime
So you had to be very careful finding out what someone meant by dinner
What you ate as a middle class person in the middle of the day was the lunch and never dinner
So your faux pas  is extremely forgivable and your host should’ve realised you might get the wrong end of the stick

I don't think you'll find there were potatoes available in Henry VII's time...... A little more historical accuracy please.

Seems like she doesn't know  The United States is NOT The United Kingdom

Yorkshire pudding - all these individual ones are FAKES.  Where I come from in the Midlands, a proper Yorkshire Pudding is cooked in the same tin as the meat.  The batter goes in around the meat 20 minutes before the meat is ready.  I had never seen one of these individual ones until I moved south.  I still make mine in the same way as my mother and my grandmother did - far more delicious as they incorporate the juices from the meat.  Long ago the pudding would be served as a first course before the meat and vegetables for obvious reasons.  And the mett was always Beef.

What sacrilege! Roast spuds go in cold, peeled and uncooked straight into the steam roaster, into the fat around the joint, so they can take on the golden colour of the meat - which can be beef, pork, lamb or poultry. Par-boiling them is a waste of time and energy.