Don't Sweat the Aubergine

mark 2/150°C, but, as I’ve said before, ovens may vary.
    3 • Cooking time . You risk poisoning yourself if you eat chicken that is still bloody. Test by inserting a thin knife or skewer into the meat at the thickest part of the thigh: if the juices run clear, the chicken is safe to eat; if there’s any trace of red, you need to cook the bird for longer.
    There are recipes that tell you to cook a 1.5kg chicken at 200°C for 50 minutes to an hour. I have found that the juices are clear after that time, but that the leg meat is still a little unyielding for my taste. I prefer the formula I’ve given above (20 minutes for each 500g, plus 30 minutes); by that time, the meat is close to falling off the bone.
    There is a problem with my timings, though. The breast meat certainly does not take that long to cook; and the longer it spends in the oven after it has passed its point of readiness, the drier and tougher it gets.
    This is the challenge in all meat cookery. You are heating muscle fibres, which become dry and tough if they are cooked for very long; you are also heating connective tissue, which needs long cooking to become tender. Fat is also part of the mix; it keeps the meat lubricated.
    The connective tissue is what harnesses the muscles. The bits of an animal that get most exercise have the most connective tissue; in a raw or undercooked state, they are tough. The tender cuts, such as fillet steak, have little connective tissue.
    When roasting a chicken, you’re cooking tender breast meat and tough leg meat at the same time: it’s as if you were cooking fillet steak alongside chuck. You wouldn’t cook fillet steak for an hour and a half; and that timing is not ideal for chicken breast, either. I have found, nevertheless, that the method here produces perfectly acceptable results. Perhaps the butter helps to keep the breast meat tender; certainly, fat in ‘marbled’ cuts of meat performs this function.
    I don’t believe that the sauce in the roasting pan helps to maintain tenderness. Some writers seem to think that surrounding meat with moisture will keep the meat itself moist; but anyone who has eaten an unsuccessful stew will know that it’s perfectly possible for meat to emerge from liquid in a dried-out state. The wine or stock in the pan will lower the oven temperature; but that effect will be cancelled out by the qualities of the steam, which is a more efficient heating medium than air. Liquid will ‘actually increase the fluid loss’, Harold McGee writes. The net effect in the basic recipe above – lower oven temperature, but increased heating efficiency – is probably neutral.
    You might come across recipes suggesting you wrap the chicken in foil, uncovering it half an hour before it’s due to be ready in order to brown the skin. As I say, steaming the chicken will cook it pretty efficiently: even if the temperature inside the foil parcel is lower than that of the oven, the breast meat will be dry after an hour or so – and you still have to subject it to a 30-minute blast of unmediated heat.
    There is a solution that Gordon Ramsay and other chefs prefer: you separate legs and wings from the breast, and start cooking them first. I don’t bother to do this when I’m roasting a chicken, but I do poach a chicken in stages.
    4 • Resting . On removal from the oven, a roast has a lot of juice close to the surface. Start carving, and the juice will spurt out. As the meat rests, the hotter, outer meat transfers its heat to the centre, continuing to cook it and transferring juices to it as well; also, the meat fibres, as they cool, retain their moisture better. So a rested chicken, or joint of beef or whatever, will be a moister one. Some juices will leak out, even so; you can add those to your gravy.
    I’ve already commented on writers’ annoying habit of telling you to keep things ‘in a warm place’. I’ve got a grill, above my oven, with a door that opens frontwards, providing a table. The best I can do is put the resting meat on that; with the oven on, it’s warmish. (I warm plates and serving dishes inside the grill – not turned on, of course.)
    However, one of the reasons why cooking a roast meal can be so stressful is that we get far too worried about serving every component of it piping hot. A rested roast will retain its heat for some time, but it does not have to be hot to be enjoyable. A lukewarm gravy would be disappointing, though.
    5 • Carving . If your carving