as a verb, meant originally to cook by exposure to radiant heat in the open; but has more recently come to mean what would formerly have been called baking, namely cooking in the enclosed space provided by an oven.
The term, in either sense, is usually applied to meat. It can be used of fish or vegetables, but less commonly although it is familiar in certain uses, e.g. roast potatoes.
Meat roasted in the earlier sense was kept turning on a spit in front of a fire, with a dripping pan under it to collect the melting fat, and had to be basted almost continuously to avoid its being dried out. If it was cooked at the same fire, but by being held over it on a gridiron, that would be to grill (US broil) it.
Meat ‘roasted’ in the oven is being cooked in a moist heat and needs no or less basting. The term ‘pot-roast’ indicates doing much the same thing but in a covered cooking vessel, with a small amount of liquid, the meat being browned first and possibly accompanied by vegetables; see braise.
Roasting meat was something at which the British were, indeed are, supposed to excel. An 18th-century visitor to England from Sweden, Per Kalm, remarked that ‘the English men understand almost better than any other people the art of properly roasting a joint’. Admittedly, he qualified the compliment by observing that the English art of cooking did not extend much beyond roast beef and plum pudding, but still it was a compliment; and the French term rosbifs for Englishmen may also be taken as including at least a touch of affection, although usually derogatory.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
