Don't Sweat the Aubergine

which you can make a sauce, removed from the oven.
ROAST TURKEY
    A cooked turkey with a moist breast is one of the holy grails of cooking. It’s hard enough to produce a tender chicken breast at the end of an hour and a half in the oven; a turkey may be in there for 3 hours or longer. You see all sorts of suggestions: fast cooking, slow cooking, brining, covering the breast or whole bird in foil (see the remarks about roast chicken and foil, above), covering the breast in buttered muslin. The technique I like best, probably because it’s the least fussy, is one recommended by Nigella Lawson (
How To Eat
): you roast the bird breast-side down, turning it over only for the last half-hour of cooking. That way, the fat in the turkey’s back percolates down towards the breast, where it’s most needed. Use the temperatures recommended above for roast chicken; but, as turkeys increase in size, the average time it takes to cook each 500g decreases. Lawson gives 2 hours for a 4.5kg turkey, and 3 1/2 hours for a 9kg one. But do check that the juices from the thickest part of the thigh run clear.
OTHER POULTRY AND GAME
    The smaller birds need gentle browning in a frying pan first, because they won’t have very long in the oven. After browning, a poussin will cook in 20 minutes to half an hour; a pigeon in about the same time; a pheasant will take about 40 minutes.
ROAST PORK: LOIN
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HOW TO MAKE IT
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    Get your butcher to score the rind; or do it yourself, with a Stanley knife, cutting vertical lines about a finger’s-width apart. Pat the rind dry, and rub a little sunflower or vegetable oil into it. 1 Season the meat, and put it in a roasting pan into a gas mark 7/220°C oven for 25 minutes, 2 then turn down the oven to gas mark 3/160°C. 3 Allow 25 minutes for each 500g of pork, with an extra 25 minutes. Rest the meat for at least 20 minutes before carving.
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WHY YOU DO IT
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    1 • Crackling . I must admit that I do not produce perfect crackling every time. I think the principles I follow are sound, though, if not foolproof.
    The scoring of the rind facilitates dehydration, and allows fat from below to bubble up, crisping the surface. You do not need at this stage to encourage further dehydration by salting the rind: the heat of the oven will do this job thoroughly on its own. Anyway, you need some water to stay there, because it will be the medium in which collagen, the tough protein that gives the rind its rubberiness, dissolves. The high initial heat is supposed to perform this process, as well as to brown the meat. After it, you can salt the rind, if you like – you want to get rid of the water now, retaining only the skin’s crunchy qualities.
    If your rind is not crackling when the joint is ready, try removing it and frying it. Put it in a heavy pan, with a little oil, over a gentle heat, and turn it often, because it will burn easily. It is easier to control the heat by frying than it is by grilling or putting the rind back into a hot oven.
    I have not had good results when I’ve tried to kick-start the crackling process by frying or grilling the skin first. The skin has browned before the collagen has dissolved, I think.
    If you braise the pork, you do not have to forgo the crackling. Indeed, you may get better results, because of the efficient breaking down of the collagen by the liquid. At the end of cooking, slice off the rind, and cut it into smaller pieces if you’ll find them easier to manipulate. Put them into a heavy frying pan with a little oil over a low heat, and turn them frequently to prevent burning. Their residual liquid content will, before it vaporizes, cause them to crackle loudly, and even to jump in the pan. You should produce deliciously crisp crackling in 10 to 15 minutes.
    2 • Searing . Unless it is a small joint, without much fatty protection, pork will take a higher initial heat than will chicken.
    3 • Cooking . The lean meat from the loin of pork – that includes chops – is hard to cook well. Pork, like chicken, has to be cooked thoroughly before it’s safe to eat: and again, as with the lean meat of chicken, there is only a brief interval between the moment when it is ready and the moment when it dries out.
ROAST PORK: SHOULDER, SPARE RIB ROAST, BELLY
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HOW TO MAKE IT
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    1 Prepare the joint and the rind as with the loin ( see here ), but this time put the joint in its roasting tin on to the floor of the oven at its lowest temperature setting – if you like,