I have been home from France for three weeks and somehow, I
have managed to eat five roast dinners in that time. I think that’s something
of a personal record.
The thing I find fascinating about roast dinners is how much
they vary from family to family, given that they are all essentially the same
thing: meat, potatoes and vegetables. Some families will only ever serve
Yorkshire Puddings with beef, whereas others consider it a staple of every
Sunday roast. Some people only cook chicken, while others would always choose
to cook lamb. Potatoes are mashed, or roasted, or boiled – or, if you’re Irish,
all three. Red sauce is either ketchup or redcurrant jelly or sometimes even
cranberry sauce. Sometimes broccoli is the vegetable that can always be found
on the table, in other houses, it’s carrot and parsnip.
While I don’t advocate a pub chain’s equivalent of a roast
dinner over one that your mum or grandmother has made (they can never, ever cook vegetables without making them
taste vaguely school dinners-y); there is something quite pleasing in that
fundamentally, there is no difference between that kind of a roast and the
elaborate affair that is the Christmas dinner.
Which is why I can never understand why there is always so
much fuss made over how difficult the
Christmas meal is to make. It’s not as if we Brits are inexperienced when it
comes to roasting meat and serving it with potatoes and vegetables – a fair few
of us do that every weekend. But for some reason, Christmas dinner is meant to
be:
a.
incredibly stressful and demanding
b.
more complicated than any other meal you could
make and
c.
a total disaster from start to finish.
My mother has always approached Christmas dinner like she
would any Sunday roast. “The only difference is that the turkey’s bigger,
because for some reason we think that we need three times more turkey for this
particular roast dinner than we would any other Sunday,” she said to me this
Christmas. At the risk of making my mother sound as if she doesn’t do Christmas
dinner properly, I have to say, she takes a fairly relaxed approach to making
Christmas dinner. Which is probably why she insists on cooking it for the
family every year and would possibly have a bit of a wobbly if someone else
volunteered for the task.
Mum insists that there are five core principles when it
comes to making a roast – whether it’s a typical Sunday roast or Christmas
dinner.
1.
Make your life easier by preparing vegetables
ahead of time.
Prepare the vegetables or potatoes as early as you feel you
can get away with. Peeling carrots, parsnips and potatoes on Christmas Eve has
become as much a tradition for our family as me going to Midnight Mass and
sneaking in with the neighbour for a cheeky glass of red after the service.
Even when it’s not Christmas, get ahead with doing the
vegetable prep. Are your carrots really going to suffer for sitting in a
saucepan full of water for a couple of hours before you need them? Cook the
cauliflower before you need to make the white sauce – you don’t need to faff
with making sure that’s not overcooked and that the white sauce is smooth, too.
Do the vegetables, then do the sauce. It’s going in the oven anyway.
2.
The microwave is your friend.
Seriously. Put aside any snobbish misconceptions you may
have. Make your carrot and parsnip, mash them, and then when everyone descends
for dinner just put the bowl in a microwave to reheat it. It’ll not ruin them.
Honest. If it’s good enough for a whole wealth of celebrity chefs, it’s good
enough for you and your Sunday roast.
3.
Timing is everything.
Work out how much time your chicken (or turkey or lamb or
beef) is going to take and plan accordingly. If you’ve prepared the vegetables
ahead of time and aren’t frightened to use the microwave, it’s okay to just
swan into the kitchen every so often and give your veggies a gentle prod.
4.
Let the meat rest before you carve it.
It’s much easier and you don’t end up with some bits that
are the size of house bricks and others that are thinner than the slices of
Tesco Value wafer-thin ham.
5.
Don’t be a Sunday roast martyr.
There is nothing more annoying than to be really enjoying a
meal someone’s cooked for you, making all the appropriate ‘yummy’ noises whilst
they sit and prod at their dinner, complaining about how much effort it took
and how the honey-roast parsnips just taste like nothing. It doesn’t half put
you off complimenting the meals – and then the cook gets all huffy because
nobody appreciates the food.
The bottom line is, Sunday dinners are not complicated.
Christmas dinners are not complicated. All it takes is a bit of common sense
and a basic idea of how much time has passed.
The other option, of course, is to do what my mother does
and just get a joint of beef, brown it gently in a Le Creuset-style pot with
olive oil and herbs, pour in some wine, a stock pot and then just stick it in
the oven at a low heat for some number of hours.
