Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are from Feast: Food to Celebrate Life, by Nigella Lawson.
I have always, resolutely, been an anti-perfectionist, but in all honesty it is impossible to cook roast potatoes without needing them, tremulously, to be perfect. That means sweet and soft in the inside and with a thick golden-brown carapace of crunch without. And the strange thing is, no matter how many tricky things you can attempt and succeed at in cooking, no matter what elaborate techniques you might learn to master, nothing gives you that wholly happy yet unbrazen glow of pleasure in your achievement that cooking a good pan of roast potatoes does.
A good roast potato isn't about showing off or about striving desperately to impress. Nor is it a difficult thing to achieve, but I can't pretend it isn't a high pressure zone. You either get it right or you don't, and anything less than perfect is a disappointment. It's brutal but it's the truth.
However, unlike many things in cooking — and indeed life — it's relatively straightforward to achieve. That's to say, the crucial factor is the heat of the fat you roast the potatoes in. Get that right and the rest should follow. No reason why not.
And you can do things that help: cut the potatoes fairly small, so that the ratio of crunch to soft middle is high; use goose fat as your frying medium; parboil the potatoes (nothing new here), only before you roast them, sprinkle them and bash them about with semolina. These are not exactly tricks, but they are my most useful pointers.
There is nothing further to say: this recipe is most pleasing for its simplicity.
