Latest features Cooking a roast - the experts' guide

Date Published:

19/10/2007

Top gastropub chefs share their tips for cooking the perfect roast. Turns out, it's easy

The sauces

Guy Tullberg runs Tracklements, a family business which has been making sauces, jellies and chutneys using traditional methods for thirty five years. He also has an extensive collection of cookery books, dating from as far back as the fourteenth century. In Guy's opinion the roast is not complete without an accompanying 'tracklement'- a word meaning the traditional accompaniment to meat, fish or cheese.

Sauces have accompanied the roast for centuries, offering a sharp taste to cut through the fattiness of roast meat.

Traditional meat and sauce combinations match:

Beef with horseradish sauce or mustard.

Lamb with mint sauce or a mint jelly.

Pork with apple sauce or an apple jelly.

Chicken with redcurrant jelly.

You can play around with these suggestions and mix them up. Apple sauce goes well with chicken for example and redcurrant jelly tastes great with lamb, but not if you've already poured mint sauce over it. Otherwise, there's no reason why two or more tracklements shouldn't be used together.

Horseradish sauce and redcurrant jelly are fiddly to make but a mint sauce can be rustled up easily by pouring boiling a little boiling water onto finely chopped mint and mixing it with vinegar and salt to taste.

Apple sauce is also fairly simple to make. Stew some chopped apples over a low heat until they reduce to a puree. And add cinnamon or nutmeg for a bit of a kick.