"Clearly, roasting is really the only way to treat vegetables if one hopes to be modern." J. Bryan Lowder/Slate
In 1993 Delia Smith published her Summer Collection. It was the first of her books that I bought, having had to catalogue the video series for my job at the time as Head cataloguer for the State Film Centre Library, which had a video library mostly aimed at people in regional Victoria. Video - long gone, but new at the time. As were two recipes in particular in that book - new that is - Piedmont roasted peppers and Roasted ratatouille. Now Elizabeth David for one, had already published a version of the peppers, but her books did not have glossy pictures or accompanying videos of TV series, and so they flew beneath the radar. Her impact was more general than for specific recipes.
I was, however, so impressed by Delia's videos that I went out and bought the book and like, probably millions of people around the world, made those divine Piedmontese peppers, for which everyman and his dog has a recipe these days. And ditto for the roasted ratatouille. Indeed I think I did a post on it a long time ago, featuring various different versions derived from that long ago recipe - like this one - Mediterranean roasted vegetables from a website called She Loves Biscotti. Although it's just one example of dozens of variations on the theme. Evolution - continuing to this day.
"This is the dish that launched a thousand student cooking careers." said Henry Dimbleby, although he was talking more generally about roasted vegetables of all kinds, saying that:
"If you type 'roast vegetables' into Google Images, you will see hundreds of amazingly similar photographs of the same dish: peppers, carrots, onions and whatever else the cook had to hand, chopped up and tossed in oil and roasted until soft with a few burnt bits around the outside"
Which is so true - I'm looking at them now.
Moreover, just to demonstrate how everyday this has become I found this from a website called Delia Redacted. It's Delia's recipe in its original form with these words written above it:
"Jane says “yum”
Delia says so many unnecessary words"
So when you look at the recipe you see that all you are left with are the title, the number of serves, the ingredients, the oven temperature and size of dish required, plus the only words that matter:
"Roast on the highest shelf of the oven for 30-40 minutes or until the vegetables are roasted and tinged brown at the edges."
In fact you could also reduce the ingredients to some kind of weight or volume measurement plus the seasonings and the oil. No need to actually specify what vegetable, or indeed what seasoning. Back then, however, we needed the whole thing.
When I was a child - well all the years of my life to the 90s and Delia, the only vegetables I ever had roasted were potatoes - and the very occasional onion to go with the roast beef, and the even more occasional roast parsnip when they had their brief season. And those were treated very plainly, simply placed in the pan with the roasting meat to absorb the juices from the meat - similarly unadorned. Which isn't to say that they weren't delicious.
But then came Delia, who not only introduced the notion of roasting vegetables just for themselves, but also using those roasted vegetables in other ways - well one way in that book - Roasted vegetable couscous salad with harissa-style dressing. It was so popular that when she came to write her Winter Collection she included a recipe for Roasted roots with herbs although I don't think she had a recipe for how to use them.
Nowadays you will find dozens and dozens of recipes for using oven roasted vegetables - tarts, pasta, salads, pizza, puréed as sauces ...
I say it was Delia who taught us that roasting vegetables was incredibly easy and delicious as well as, indeed, suggesting that it was something worth doing, but if you read American publications and websites, you will see claims that it all came from America in the 80s. Never mind, of course, that archaeologists, have now discovered than man was roasting vegetables 170,000 years ago. And has been ever since. Well - as I said - we have at least been roasting potatoes - and other roots and tubers for a very long time. Today, however, they are just so everyday.
At this point I should perhaps acknowledge that this is actually a Lucky Dip post - the lucky dip being the recipe at right - Roasted red onions with port and bay - from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's book River Cottage Everyday - and in this case the Ever Open Sauce website, which has published the recipe. In a way there is nothing new to see here, in that it's not much more than those roast onions I grew up with. And yet it is. The onions are red - I don't think we knew about red onions back then - and they are presented as a vegetable in their own right, not simply as something cooked with the Sunday roast. Moreover there are additions - bay leaves, port, not to mention juniper berries, which were an ingredient I did not discover until my Elizabeth David days.
It's one of half a dozen or so roasted vegetable recipes which he offers as examples of the versatility of the method.
He wrote this recipe back in 2007 and indeed it might have been a relatively new approach back then, but time waits for no-one in the cooking world and these days virtually every vegetable you can think of has been roasted in some way or another, not just the more obvious squash, carrots, beetroot and potatoes that he mentioned back then. By 2014 Henry Dimbleby's collaborator Jane Baxter was able to go so far as to say that you should:
"never boil (or even steam) a vegetable. Roasting them instead enhances and intensifies their natural flavour, causing the natural sugars to caramelise and giving a crisp outside and a soft centre."
Although she did make an exception for peas, green beans and new potatoes which could indeed be cooked in other ways. Which is not to say that of course, you can do other things with vegetables than roast them, but the statement does indeed demonstrate how ubiquitous the roasting method has become.
Today I give three examples of the more extreme - Jamie offers Roasted kale; Samuel Goldsmith on the BBC Good Food website gives us Whole roasted cauliflower - a very popular vegetarian offering these days. Then there is David Chang of Momofuku who is credited by some to have begun the craze for roasted brussels sprouts with his recipe for Roasted brussels sprouts with fish sauce vinaigrette which you can find on the Food 52 website and of which Chang says: “Cook the shit out of them; just don’t turn them to charcoal.”
These days you will find that every cookbook has at least one recipe for some kind of roasted vegetable. Some are modern inventions, but many are derived from classic recipes from cuisines which were not so well known in my youth - Tomates provençales (Elizabeth David), Imam bayildi (Vidar Bergum - A Kitchen in Istanbul), for example:
Roasted vegetables are indeed a wonderful thing in so many ways. They are an ideal way to use up slightly overripe vegetables in your fridge. They are an exciting, but easy way to experiment with what goes with what - both the vegetables themselves and the things you put with them. And they are a wonderful standby when cooked to have available for the tarts, salads, pizza, pasta, etc. that I mentioned above.
Nigel also has a tip as to those crucial flavourings that you might want to add:
"Tossing everything together while the roasted vegetables are still warm is a thoroughly good thing, the vegetables seem to absorb the flavours more readily, but even better is to incorporate the roasting juices into the oil and aromatics."
Especially good for those destined for presentation as a salad.
Did I say easy? I mean you just throw them in a tray with some kind of fat and some flavouring, although really you don't even need that, put them in a hot oven and leave them to it - or as Nigel says: "intervention is less crucial when dinner is cooking behind a closed door." And I almost forgot to mention, perhaps the star of the whole genre - oven dried tomatoes. Leave your sliced tomatoes in the low oven overnight, sprinkled with salt, pepper, a touch of sugar and in the morning you have the most delicious condiment that you put in a jar with garlic, basil and oil for dipping into every now and then.
And finally, although I suppose it's a separate topic - what about fruit? Elizabeth David's baked apricots are one of my very favourite desserts, and, of course, I should not forget my childhood baked apples. But as I say - another topic.
I wonder if roast vegetables of the more extreme kind - those brussels sprouts and the kale perhaps - are a flash in the pan (pardon the almost pun) or whether they are here to stay? Well did they ever go away anyway? They have been around for 170,000 years - at least - after all.
YEARS GONE BY
January 12
2024 - Nothing
2020 - Lucky dip - harissa
2017 - Nothing
Today's post was a lucky dip and there are two more here. Coincidence or is it a mid January thing?
Three cheers
Roasted Vegetables are not on the top of my food list, but worth 3 stars! Great to have the blog back again. Yeah! 🤣
Back! Yum