We all aspire to cook roast potatoes with the elusive shatteringly crisp shell and cloud-like interior, salivates Emma Hughes, as she discovers the golden rules for serving up the crunchiest of spuds
Book Four of Tolkien’s The Two Towers finds Samwise Gamgee trying to persuade a recalcitrant Gollum to dig for their dinner. Potatoes, the hobbit enthuses, are ‘rare good ballast for an empty belly’, as well as being one of Frodo’s favourite things. Gollum is unmoved (‘Sméagol won’t grub for roots and carrotses’), but the passage generated considerable debate as to how potatoes ended up in Middle Earth without a fictional Sir Walter Raleigh-type figure to bring them there. To my mind, there’s an easy answer. Tolkien wanted his readers to feel at home, so he dispensed with continuity to give them a taste of it. And of all the ways with potatoes, roasting them is surely the most evocative, comforting and quintessentially British of the lot.
‘Nothing,’ Nigella Lawson stated in her 2008 volume of Christmas recipes, ‘gives quite the contented glow of achievement that cooking a good tray of roast potatoes does.’ At this time of year, home cooks have them on their minds, experimenting with goose fat or a sprinkling of cornmeal. However, come Sunday lunchtime, some of London’s most in-demand restaurants are now going into roast-potato overdrive, tending to them with forensic care in pursuit of the elusive shatteringly crisp shell and cloud-like interior.
‘Our supplier tests the starch content of our potatoes weekly to check they’re perfect,’ explains head chef Jamie Shears of Mount Street Restaurant and The Audley. ‘The day before, we boil them with lots of thyme, garlic and salt, then leave them to steam. Finally, once they’re completely dry, we roast them in very hot, aged beef fat.’ Over at Claridge’s, the glow of the antique-brass fittings is rivalled by the gleam of the super-crispy spuds, which are watched continually in the oven to ensure they’re removed not a minute too soon — no mean feat, when you’re serving 600 in a day. At the Mandarin Oriental, Heston Blumenthal has built an entire menu around them. What was relegated to the status of side dish in the latter half of the 20th century, as our diets became ever-more carnivorous, has become the main event — again.
‘Considering the potato’s journey through time and place… it seems right that potatoes and their growers should be afforded a great deal of respect,’ chef Jeremy Lee writes in his compendium Cooking. Long before the Incas, indigenous Peruvians went to great lengths to preserve their precious potato crops, freeze drying them by leaving them out at night and then baking them in the hot sun. By the 18th century, this South American crop had reached Europe and been recognised, as Rebecca Earle puts it in Feeding The People: The Politics of the Potato, as ‘an exceptionally efficient way of converting sunlight, soil and water into nourishment’. Yet when — and why — did we start roasting them on Sundays?
How the professionals achieve perfection
Nigella Lawson
King Edward or Yukon Gold potatoes cut relatively small (‘so that the ratio of crunchy outside to fluffy interior is optimised’), dredged in semolina after par-boiling and tipped into very hot goose fat for roasting. From Nigella Christmas
Yotam Ottolenghi
Maris Piper or other floury potatoes, cut into irregularly shaped pieces, left to cool and dry completely after boiling and tossed in rice flour or semolina before roasting in sunflower oil. From Comfort
Simon Hopkinson
Désirée potatoes cut into relatively small chunks (three pieces from a medium-sized potato’), shaken in a colander after parboiling and roasted in beef dripping at the bottom of the oven, turned once during cooking. From COUNTRY LIFE
Delia Smith
Désirée potatoes halved (or left whole if they’re small), roasted in lard or dripping—ideally, you would match the fat to the meat you’re serving—and turned once at half time: ‘It is crunchiness that is so often missing; when you tap them, they should sound crisp.’ From Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course
In Leftovers, food historian Eleanor Barnett paints a vivid picture of a market in Victorian London ‘filled with the noise and bustle of London’s working inhabitants who are rushing to purchase their Sunday dinner before the 11am deadline, when the bell is rung and it’s time to put matters of food and flesh on hold for church and a day of rest’. Potatoes, peeled and chopped, would be laid under the family’s joint of meat before the whole lot went in the oven when everyone was at church, ensuring a feast after the service. Perhaps this is how potatoes first donned the mantle of a pleasure that must be earned, if not through prayer, then via the industrious application of the peeler. Even today, with all the kitchen gadgetry available to us, we haven’t found a way of fast-tracking roast potatoes — they remain the opposite of instant gratification and all the better for it.
When rationing came in at the start of the Second World War, potatoes were the subject of a marketing push aimed at making the nation less reliant on imported wheat. Its zenith came with the publication in 1940 of Potato Pete’s Recipe Book, fronted by a jolly tuber. ‘Don’t think of potatoes merely as something to serve with the meat,’ he proclaimed. ‘They can be much more than that.’ However, roast potatoes are conspicuously absent from the book — spuds might not have been on the ration, but fat certainly was — and they were off the official menu even at Christmas, with the Ministry of Food’s wartime festive-fare pamphlets making no mention of them.
Once rationing ended, we piled roast potatoes back onto our plates with a vengeance. As a nation, we seem to be unique in our taste for them. In 2020, prompted by a New York Times photograph of pallid roasties, the food writer Felicity Cloake observed that ‘proper crunchy roast potatoes aren’t a thing’ outside of the UK and Ireland. Indeed, a quick browse through international food publications’ supposed recipes for them reveals nothing that we Britons would recognise as the real deal: the potatoes are almost invariably cut too small, undercooked and sprinkled with unnecessary greenery.
Impress the Christmas guests with unbeatable roasties. Credit: Getty
The first step to success is choosing the right variety of potato. Save waxy spuds, which hold their shape when boiled, for salads. Floury ones, with their high starch content, are more fragile and start to fall apart in water, which means lots of craggy edges to create crunch. ‘It’s always worth looking out for locally grown varieties,’ Mr Lee advises; plastic-bagged ones may have been in storage for a while, which can affect the taste and nutrients. He has a soft spot for Arran Victories, a heritage crop at its best ‘gently scrubbed before simmering briefly so as not to break up and collapse in the pan’. At Mount Street, Mr Shears favours a less well-known variety called Agria, ‘which is naturally golden in colour, fluffy and full of flavour: very much how potatoes used to be’.
The other essential element is fat of some kind. The dripping from your Sunday roast is traditional: on a recent visit to Yorkshire, The King confirmed his preference for this approach. Whether you follow his example or go with oil or lard, most chefs advise getting it really hot before tipping your par-boiled potatoes in. There is the odd dissenting voice: when he went on Desert Island Discs in 2009, Sir Michael Caine shared his recipe for ‘the best roast potatoes in the world’ and recommended using cold olive oil ‘so it soaks in’.
Whichever tack you take, you should always make at least an extra serving’s worth — people invariably want seconds and leftover roast potatoes are a gift. You can’t do better than the traditional Monday coda to a Sunday roast: bubble and squeak, perfection itself topped with a fried egg at any time of day. ‘If you wake up mildly regretful, anxious and in need of stabilising… if you reach midday and the myth of porridge keeping you sustained has made itself apparent for the nth time; if a van drove through a puddle, soaking you and your new coat as you waited at the bus stop — this is for you,’ cook and gardener Mark Diacono writes in his book Vegetables.
It’s a sentiment that applies just as well to roast potatoes proper — and with which Sam Gamgee would surely agree. ‘I’d give a lot for half a dozen taters,’ he sighs wistfully, as Gollum looks on in bafflement.
Emma Hughes is a writer and author. When she’s not tapping away at the keyboard, she’s usually found taking a tray of something delicious out of the oven.
