Last Sunday we had a roast dinner.
Elspeth has never much liked meat. When she was little, she’d
eat all the other bits of a roast dinner with great gusto, but didn’t want the
meat (funnily enough, I used to like my roast dinners like this when I was a
child, but I liked to eat the meat first, in my fingers when it was hot, and
then not have any on my plate). So when Els suggested making a roast dinner following
the recipes in Anna Jones’s A Modern Way
to Eat I thought, why not? Let’s give it a go.
I couldn’t really imagine how it was going to work. I was
thinking of the types of vegetables I usually roast – peppers and aubergines
and onions. They didn’t seem very roast-dinnery. There would be gravy, Elspeth
said, and I thought of the delicious onion gravy I make (from a Nigel Slater
recipe, just to prove after last week that I really do have time for him). The centrepiece
would be a Yorkshire pudding. Great – that made sense. And roast potatoes, of
course. You can’t have a roast dinner without roast potatoes.
What we actually ate was the huge plateful of different
flavours and textures that you see above – which, as it turns out, exactly
mirrored the traditional parts of a meat-based roast dinner without for a
moment making me feel that the meat was missing. There was roast squash, carrots
and beetroot. I must have had roasted carrots before, but these were a
revelation. I wonder if I’ll bother with parsnips again – carrots are tenderer
and sweeter. There were perfect roast potatoes. There was a mixture of greens,
purple sprouting broccoli, asparagus and green beans, just barely still crunchy
and with a tahini dressing. The Yorkshire pudding, flavoured with horseradish,
could have been lighter, but it drew all the flavours together perfectly.
And the gravy?
I can’t tell you how perfect the gravy was. You need to try
it yourself. It looked like the very best homemade gravy you ever saw, perfect
thickness, dark, a little shiny. And it tasted, rich, flavourful, well-seasoned.
This was Anna’s sticky roasted vegetable gravy, made by roasting celery, onion,
leeks, carrot and garlic very hot, then mashing them in the roasting tin. You
then place the roasting tin on the hob and proceed in the usual way of making
gravy, adding flour and stock, scraping in the bits that are stuck to the pan.
Here’s the thing – I think the gravy makes the roast dinner.
When there’s too little or it’s too thin or too salty or not flavourful enough,
it can dull the meal, no matter how perfect the rest is. This gravy is good
enough that I would consider making it even if I were roasting meat.
And we’re already wondering how we could enhance this roast
dinner to become our Christmas dinner – or if we should just do it exactly the
same the next time.
You can find the complete menu from week twenty-one here.
Claire Watts and her family are cooking vegetarian for a year. You can find out why - and why 'cooking vegetarian' doesn't always necessarily mean 'eating vegetarian' here.
Claire Watts writes and edits books for children.
She's currently working on making something beautiful with fairy tales.
Find out about her Snippets project and how you can help on her Patreon page.
