I don't think potato leather will catch on as a side dish

[fivemack]

Jean Brillat-Savarin, Harold McGee and Heston Blumenthal have pointed out repeatedly over the last century or so that slow-cooking joints of meat is the way to go. So I bought from Tesco a pound and a bit of silverside, some potatoes and a parsnip, peeled and chopped up such things as need peeling up and chopping, stuck the whole in a 120C oven at 11am, and ate it at six.

There are plus points: the house is filled with the smell of cooking beef for seven hours, and, under a crunchy brownish-black outside, the beef falls apart into strands as the collagen has disintegrated, and the strands are of an enjoyable texture.

However, potatoes, and particularly parsnips, don't have collagen. If you roast a parsnip for seven hours, it turns into something with the dimensions of a chip and a taste somewhere between parsnip-infused shoe-leather and parsnip-inspired charcoal. The potatoes shrunk enormously and developed a leathery outer coating, but were at least edible.

So, if doing this again for company, I should put the beef on at 11am and the vegetables on at, say, 4:30. Also, make by some means a prodigious quantity of gravy.

At least I have a chunk of lovely tender beef sufficient for several sandwiches, and I think mango chutney would moisten it nicely. Or maybe pesto.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I hate to be a pedant (no, I love to be a pedant, so here I am, being pedantic), but Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) pointed out that slow cooking was a good thing a wider definition of "a century or so" ago (plus or minus a century?) than I would think accurate. But maybe I'm just cross because here in Conil we don't have an oven, and so I can't even experiment with what sounds a lovely recipe.