While everybody else is spreading good cheer and all that, I view major holidays as an opportunity to eat. I can’t actually afford to eat in the style that I wish I was accustomed to, so I cook. This Christmas is a traditional fat and carb filled extravaganza. Oh, we’re having roasted green beans, but that’s about the only nod towards rational healthy eating. Otherwise we’re having an artery-clogging, insulin cranking traditional feast. A big beef standing rib, Yorkshire pudding, roasted potatoes.

When I was a kid, we never ate at my grandmother’s. Other people remember grandma’s cooking. My grandmother was not domestic. She didn’t actually wash her glasses, she just rinsed them, which my mother found so skeevy that I don’t think she ever drank so much as a glass of water at her mother-in-law’s, although she also never said anything until long after my grandparents were gone. We did eat there once. Overdone roast beef, potatoes, and those ice cream cups with the little wooden spoons. As a kid, I found the whole bag-of-little-ice-cream-cups thing enchanting. And I suspect it certainly saved on clean-up. But what I remember even more were the roasted potatoes. Brown and caramelized on the outside, meltingly creamy on the inside. I had never had a perfectly roasted potato before and to be frank, I don’t think I ever have since. I have always suspected it was an accident. Or maybe it was the one thing she cooked really, really well.

So when I found Nigella Lawson’s recipe for roasted potatoes, promising the secret to the perfect crunch brown exterior and the soft, creamy interior, I was instantly reminded of those wonderful potatoes from my grandmother. Nigella says that the perfect roasted potato is all a matter of one simple thing—the fat. And the fat is goose fat.

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