At Christmas We Feast: Festive Food Through the Ages by Annie Gray

Author:Annie Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Roast potatoes

Roasties are on the edge of Christmas fare. Ubiquitous all year round, they really aren’t a festive food. However, they are the most common dish to appear on the festive table, so in the spirit of completeness, it seems only fair to include a brief nod.

Potatoes were introduced to the UK, along with so many other foods, as part of the Columbian exchange in the late sixteenth century. They were slow to catch on. Their peeling skin and knobbly exterior looked suspiciously leprotic, and given one of the prevailing medical doctrines of the time was that foods gave visual clues as to what they did to you, it seemed wise to avoid the risk. They were also thought to be poisonous, as related to deadly nightshade, and the earliest varieties to be grown were weedy and bitter. It was not an auspicious start.

In the eighteenth century, however, growers and governments alike became increasingly interested in potatoes. They had a long heritage in South and Central America, where they’d been a staple for thousands of years, and were now a possible solution to the looming problem of mass starvation as the European population increased. Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a Frenchman who’d been brought round to the cause of the potato while in prison in Prussia, tends to get most of the publicity for promoting the potato. Once back in France, he studied them, championed them and eventually planted up fields with ostentatious guards around them, so that the still-wary poor would break in and steal the crop. However, he was by no means alone, and, once the potato started to take off, consumption quickly soared.

Potatoes were cheap, easy and versatile. Over-reliance on them could be a killer when crops failed, though, and the Great Famine of the 1840s remains one of the darkest phases of Anglo-Irish history. But they featured on the tables of rich and poor alike, albeit cooked in very different ways. As Christmas food, though, the roast potato rules supreme.

Until the advent of closed ranges and roasting ovens, roasting meant cooked in front of the fire. In the nineteenth century recipes called ‘roast’ potatoes are more akin to baked versions today, cooked on or under the fire grate without fat. But the modern concept existed as well, with the potatoes par-boiled and added to the drip pan under the meat on its spit. Yorkshire pudding, previously known as fire or batter pudding, was cooked in the same way, benefiting equally from the heady mixture of fat and flavour which dripped steadily from the slowly turning meat.

In the twentieth century open-fire cooking gave way to ovens and roasting became synonymous with baking. A roast potato should be a textural and taste delight, crisped in fat and seasoned with salt, but they are the subject of fierce debate. To peel or not to peel, to coat with spice or semolina, to salt before or after, the kind of fat – proof, again, if any were needed, that the simplest things can be the most difficult to get right.

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