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Whole Meal Roasts
Various vegetables and fruits may be roasted in the same pan with the meat, to make complete meals. For example: 1-Roast beef, white potatoes and carrots. Put the vegetables in the pan the last forty-five minutes of cooking. 2-Roast pork, sweet potatoes and cored apples. Add apples and potatoes fitty minutes before the roast will be done. 3-Roast veal, new potatoes and whole tomatoes. Add the potatoes forty-five minutes before the meal will be done, and the tomatoes peeled and seasoned, the last twenty minutes. 4-Roast stuffed breast of lamb, parsnips and potatoes. Peel the potatoes, cut in quarters. Blanch the parsnips, peel and slice lengthwise. Add the last thirty-five minutes.
These are timing schemes rather than a single recipe: the roast is assumed knowledge, and the vegetables are slotted in around it. A few blanks need filling before the plan works in a modern oven.
- Supply the oven temperatureNone is given because the book assumes you already have a roast underway. For all four combinations a steady 350F suits the vegetables; if you prefer a hotter finish for browning, add the vegetables at 350F and raise the heat only in the last ten minutes.
- Time backwards from the meat, not the clockEvery instruction here is "x minutes before the roast is done," so you need a target finish time. Use a probe thermometer in the meat rather than minutes per pound, and add the vegetables when the internal reading is roughly 20-25F short of your target.
- Pork doneness has changedPork roasts of this period were commonly taken to 185F or beyond, which is why fifty minutes of apple and sweet potato worked alongside one. Current practice is a minimum of 145F with a rest for a whole pork loin (a shoulder is usually taken considerably further for texture); on a 145F schedule the apples want closer to 30 minutes and the sweet potatoes should be parboiled or cut small.
- Veal and lamb temperaturesVeal roast to about 145-150F, lamb breast to 160F or higher since it is a fatty, collagen-rich cut that benefits from longer cooking. Beef to 130-135F for medium rare.
- "Blanch the parsnips"Since the recipe has you peel them afterwards, this most likely means a brief preliminary boil, as with tomatoes, though in older usage the word also covered simple part-cooking. Two to three minutes in boiling water is enough; the point is peeling, not cooking through.
- Whole tomatoes in twenty minutesPeeled and seasoned tomatoes collapse fast in a hot pan of drippings. Twenty minutes is about right, and they will render juice that thins the pan gravy — keep them to one side of the pan if you intend to make a sauce from the fat.
- Potatoes need contact with the fatVegetables added to a crowded pan steam rather than roast. Turn them once in the drippings when they go in, and give each piece space; a second pan with a few spoonfuls of the fat is better than a heaped one.
- Stuffed breast of lambA boned breast, rolled around stuffing and tied, is still sold by butchers but rarely sits in a supermarket case. Order it ahead, or substitute a boned shoulder treated the same way.
- YieldReckon on 3/4 lb of bone-in roast per person and about 6 oz of vegetables each; a 4 lb roast with two vegetables feeds about five.
Roasting the whole dinner in one pan is far older than this book, but it belonged to the coal or wood range, where the oven was hot whether you used all of it or not and fuel was the thing you economised. Books of the 1920s and 30s carried the habit into the gas and electric era as a matter of thrift and of labour: one pan, one fire, one washing-up. The pairings listed here are the conventional English and American ones — beef with potatoes and carrots, pork with apple, lamb with root vegetables — and by custom fatty meats are set against something acid or sweet. Stuffed breast of lamb appears because it was cheap: a thin, bony, fatty cut that repaid boning, stuffing and slow heat, and that has largely dropped out of retail butchery along with the rest of the inexpensive lamb carcass.