Dear Laura
IT’S a good thing you foresaw the space problem, or you would have been – quite literally – juggling hot potatoes! Obviously the ideal situation is to be able to roast the potatoes with the meat, but, in practice, this only works for a small family with a large oven. Once you have crammed the lamb into your roasting dish, you’ll to have very little room left for potatoes.
There are two schools of thought on roast potatoes, anyway. Soggy or crunchy? Those done under the meat have a superb flavour, but tend to be soggy. Or there are what my mother calls ‘hotel potatoes’. These are crispy, but taste of nothing but potato! Obviously, in a mass-catering situation, one cannot cook enough potatoes with the meat, so a totally different strategy is adopted.
Instead of only par-boiling the potatoes, they must be cooked through. And, because they are then going to be subjected to further treatment, they must stay intact. This involves using a ‘chippy’ rather than a ‘mashy’ variety and boiling them very slowly, so that they don’t rock ’n roll in the saucepan and knock the stuffing out of each other!
Boiled potatoes go black round the edges very quickly, so the next stage must follow on immediately. Cool them as fast as possible, so that they don’t continue cooking from the inside and start to disintegrate. Then pop them into a frying pan with some cooking oil (not too many at a time) and keep turning them until they are thoroughly coated and partly browned from all directions.
At this point you get your bonus! If you want them immediately, brown them off and serve them. If you want them tomorrow, let them cool and put them in the fridge. If you want them next month, freeze them. They won’t go black, or mushy, or do anything else to spoil your day! When you need them, you just finish browning them in the frying pan, or you cheat – like I do – and finish them off in the oven with a bit of the juice that has already run out of the roast!
There are also two schools of thought on gravy, and the French actually have two words for it -‘jus’ and ‘sauce’. The former is what came out of the meat, and the latter is the same thing, but tampered with. The trouble is that there is never enough ‘jus’ to go round. The more emerges, the drier the meat gets and the more you need. I usually pad it out with gravy mix, cornflour, stock, wine, or whatever seems appropriate.
Having some home-made stock in the freezer can certainly save the day. You can’t really tell the difference between what came out of today’s joint and what was extracted from boiling up the bones from last week’s. But you must label them, or you will find yourself serving beef gravy with chicken and blowing the whole con-act!
Whatever you do, please know which jar contains cornflour. Your father and I once went to a pre-Christmas-lunch cocktail party. We were having our Christmas dinner in the evening, and so were some of the other guests. Our hosts, however, were eating at lunch-time and were desperate to get rid of us before the turkey burned.
I suggested moving the rest of the party to our house and that’s what happened. About four hours later we poured everyone out through the front door – except the guy who had fallen asleep behind the sofa. We were about to sit down to dinner when a search party arrived to fetch him!
Meanwhile, (we were told later) Audrey was having hysterics back at her house, because someone had stolen their turkey – her father-in-law had decided she wasn’t in a fit state to carry it, so had taken it out of the oven himself. Miffed at being considered too pickled to dish up dinner, she insisted on making the gravy. She produced a beautifully smooth sauce with not one lump in it and everyone agreed it was a masterpiece – until they tasted it! She’d used icing sugar instead of cornflour!
Love Mom
