High Street, Windermere (01539 443 547). Sunday lunch for two, including drinks and service: £70

It’s time to talk about the really important things, the ones that make a difference. Obviously, I’m referring to the correct way to make cauliflower cheese. More food crimes have been committed in the name of cauliflower cheese than almost any other dish. So let me give you the rules: the cauliflower must be undercooked before being bathed in the sauce and it must be in a single large piece. Failure to do this will result in a mush you could masticate without the aid of teeth. Finally there must be a generous hand on both the cheese and the mustard in the sauce. Got it? Good.

OK. These are things we all know, or should. And yet when faced by dishes like this from the domestic repertoire, so many restaurants get them wrong. Order boudin de volaille à la Richelieu and they’re right there. No problem. Ask for a cauliflower cheese and it’s the end of days. They try to reinvent a classic which doesn’t need it, resulting in a crime that ought to be tried at the Hague.

The kitchen at the Lamplighter Dining Rooms in Windermere does not try to reinvent cauliflower cheese. It makes it just like your gran would make it if your gran could cook, which mine couldn’t. (Oh, the terrible things she did to ingredients. And she did them so often.) Then again, bar an issue with their Yorkshire pudding, there’s not a lot the Lamplighter gets wrong.

It was, I accept, a less-than-obvious choice for a Sunday lunch in the Lake District, but it was the one that spoke to me. It said: this is what you really want, isn’t it? And it was. Lord knows, I’d searched. Cumbria and the Lake District are, these days, blessed with restaurants. The problem is that they are weighted heavily towards the high-end tourist industry. It has a significant number of country house hotels, with the sort of aesthetic that looks really good in photographs reproduced on heavyweight glossy paper. They’re the sort of hotels where they vacuum the backs of the sofas.

I started scanning the menus and my heart fell. Two of the better-known hotels – both of which featured in Coogan and Brydon’s The Trip – offered soufflé Suisse as a Sunday lunch starter. I didn’t think it existed outside of Le Gavroche, and with good reason. It’s angina on a plate: eggs, cheese, butter, cheese, eggs and a little more butter whisked up with a dash of self-loathing. Just putting it on a menu is a way of signalling a world view. It says: we vacuum the backs of our sofas. The problem is that places which do that sort of thing cannot, in my experience, be trusted to get a roast Sunday lunch right. A proper Sunday roast lunch is a bit like Woody Allen’s joke about sex only being dirty if it’s done properly. It should never be about mimsy slices of dainty things positioned just so. It needs heft and commitment, and should result in stained napkins.

The Lamplighter’s proposition seemed to offer just that. You order in advance for the whole table: £18.95 per person for roast chicken or roast pork, £22.95 for a roast leg of lamb up to £25.95 for a wing rib of beef (there are other options including stuffed lamb saddle, and toad in the hole; an à la carte menu is also available to be ordered from on the day). This price includes soup and dessert. There are demands. You must order by the Friday before the Sunday and you need to give a credit-card number. Normally I would baulk at all this, but as you could be getting them to buy in a wing rib for six people which they will start cooking a few hours before your arrival it seems entirely fair. Do arrive on time.

The Lamplighters is not a fancy place. It rolls its eyes at fancy. I imagine all its sofas are pushed to the wall so the backs never need vacuuming. It’s a large B&B with a basic dining room attached, all sturdy brown-varnished breakfast-room furniture and serviceable carpets and piped music. But your table will be ready, marked by the large number of slate heat mats. That’s what matters. You’re going to need them.

First there is soup, vegetable or oxtail the day we go, and both taste like the sort you’d knock up at home with a stick blender. This is not a bad thing. And then come the dishes. There is a pert mound of buttery mashed carrot and swede, and a matching one of mashed potato, for mounds as pert as these must come in twos. There are roasties which too often in restaurants are a disappointment and here crunch and gasp in all the right places. There are honey-roasted parsnips that turn out to be the crystal meth of root vegetables, so deep and dark and sweet and crunchy we clean out the bowl in the name of research.

There is that magnificent cauliflower cheese, the surface of the sauce as burnished as a mummy’s golden sarcophagus. The Yorkshire arrives, promisingly, in its own black cast-iron pan, as taut and curved as my belly will be if I attempt to finish all these side dishes. It deflates quickly, however, so the stodginess at the bottom is no surprise. The fat just needed to be hotter when the batter went in.

It doesn’t matter. There is a big jug of gravy to send it on its way. Most of all there is the glorious object that is the bone-on rib of beef, delivered tableside, complete with its amber ribbon of fat. Our cheery waiter slices it up and it is, as requested, medium rare. Someone has given this bit of animal some serious attention and care. There is so much of it that we agree my companion’s dog will do very well tonight. There is horseradish cream.

Most of all there is a nostalgic sort of happiness, for this is a Sunday lunch of the sort people of my age claim to remember from childhood, but which I suspect rarely existed. It is not elegant. It is not inventive. It is so much better than that. We finish with a thick-set lemon posset full of zest and, this being the Lake District, a sticky toffee pudding which is all the things it should be. We waddle out, finally content that Sunday lunch has been treated with all the respect it deserves.

Jay’s news bites

■ As well as its à la carte, Fergus Henderson’s St John in London’s Smithfield has long offered feasting menus to be ordered in advance. King of these has to be the whole suckling pig roasted long and slow in their bread oven, to be eaten with the likes of bone marrow and parsley salad to start and Eccles cake with Lancashire cheese to finish. Feasting menus start from £35 a head (stjohngroup.uk.com).
■ This column will always champion those fighting the good fight so let’s hear it for newish Twitter account @WeWantPlates, started by Ross McGinnes. Stated
aim: to crusade “against serving food on bits of wood and roof tiles. Chips in little buckets, flowerpots and jam-jar drinks can do one, too.”
■ The food of Macau, the tiny peninsula territory an hour’s boat ride from Hong Kong, has arrived in London courtesy of a series of monthly pop-ups
in Chinatown, led by chef Lau Suet-Ming. Macau’s cuisine is the product of
centuries of Portuguese influence on local ingredients. For more info visit macaupatua.uk

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1

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