Oh, Damn, Now I Want Some

Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding, cooked the traditional British way.

Rules restaurant, in West London, has seen some colourful characters in its 211‑year history. It was the unofficial green room for much of the talent of West End theatreland including Lillie Langtry and Laurence Olivier; Maggie Thatcher, with her Eighties' helmet of hair, is commemorated in a mural on a back wall; and braying bankers could be heard guffawing over their fine bottles of claret from lunch until supper.

How times have changed –but the menu and the decor have resolutely remained the same. The rows of champagne Balthazars, Spy caricatures, stag horns and stuffed pheasants still adorn the walls, while good old-fashioned British staples such as roast rib of beef "Old England" and Yorkshire pudding are cooked up with flair. So where better to learn how to recreate these dishes than from the head chef, Dick Sawyer?

Dick's kitchen dishes out enormous Yorkshire puddings, the size of soup bowls, which they believe are moister than the smaller variety, perfect for spooning ladles of gravy into.

The secret to his tender, salty, yet lusciously sweet roast beef is to cook it in pure beef dripping, which they render down in steaming vats. "It is an age-old method of preserving food, which gives an intense, almost gamey flavour to most things," says Dick.

The restaurant sources top-quality, grass-fed Herefordshire beef which has been hung for up to 30 days to add depth of flavour. "The tastiest cut of beef is on the bone. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat," he says. Dick seasons the outside with Coleman's mustard, sea salt and ground white pepper to give it a crispy outer crust. But the most important tip when cooking a good slab of beef is in what you do after it has come off the heat. "You must rest the meat, it needs time to relax otherwise it is still tense from all that cooking," says Dick. "People often forget this and it is a terrible mistake." He recommends allowing a small joint to rest for at least 25 minutes; a big joint for an hour and a half. "You can tell how the beef is cooked through touch – rare is akin to the touch of the cheek, medium the chin and the nose is well done."

Tell me YOU don't want some of that?