October arrives, and that familiar knot forms in the stomach. The first recipe request for “something festive” has landed in my inbox. The season of impossible expectations begins.
Recipe: Parsnips With Miso and Parmesan
I love cooking for people year-round, but holiday entertaining becomes something else: grander affairs with long wish lists, plenty of guests with their nonnegotiables. Suddenly, I’m trying to juggle an unthinkable number of balls: potatoes that need boiling and cooling and roasting; stuffing that must crisp on top but stay moist inside; pastry that should be only freshly baked; different vegetables with different cooking times that somehow need to be ready at the same time.
After years of trying to pull off elaborate meals that left me stressed and my guests hovering uncertainly in the kitchen, I have some solutions.
This will require a short detour.
I was lucky enough to be in the audience recently when Hannah Fry was speaking. If you don’t know her, she’s a math professor at Cambridge, a science writer and a self-described “all-round badass.” She once said she’d happily swap food for a nutritionally complete pill — utterly baffling to me — but I love how she applies mathematical thinking to life’s messiest problems. Not to solve them perfectly, but to make them more manageable. Take her approach to finding love: Rather than thinking of it as a single bewildering system, she treats it as a multifaceted problem that can be optimized.
I’m no mathematician, but as with most things I encounter, I found myself wondering how to bring this thinking into my kitchen. Instead of trying to control the whole chaotic affair of holiday hosting, I’m now focusing on three points that make a difference. They all come together in today’s recipe.
Acid plus fat plus aromatics for brightness; nuts plus citrus plus herbs for richness.
First: Roast vegetables properly. I have learned not to crowd the pan, not to skimp on oil and to keep them cooking until they reach the color I want — this can take up to an hour in some ovens. When done right, the edges caramelize, the centers go creamy and they develop these craggy surfaces eager to be coated. My colleague Neil Campbell pointed this out about hispi cabbage recently, how its leaves create “crevices and pockets to add a sauce.” Most roasted vegetables are like this. They wait to be dressed.
Second: Keep a small arsenal of dressings in the fridge, ready to deploy. Something sharp with capers and lemon. Something nutty and creamy with tahini and yogurt. Something sweet and mustardy. The logic is straightforward: acid plus fat plus aromatics for brightness; nuts plus citrus plus herbs for richness. Using this framework, I can improvise with whatever’s lurking in my cupboards — herbs that need using up, half a jar of harissa, a small tub of Greek yogurt. I pour a green tahini sauce over potatoes, or today’s miso dressing on brussels sprouts with some toasted nuts. These dressings open endless possibilities.
Third, and this changed everything for me: Stop making so many separate things. The parsnip recipe with this column isn’t doing three separate jobs; it’s one dish that happens to cover all the bases. Parsnips roasted until golden, dressed while warm with a miso dressing, peppery rocket scattered over, sharp Parmesan on top. One tray, multiple functions, considerably less juggling.
So my new holiday formula becomes this: Make my dressings ahead. While vegetables roast for 45 minutes — time that’s completely hands-off — I focus elsewhere, like making a roast chicken or setting the table. And I try to combine as much as possible, as with today’s roasted parsnips, which are all my sides and my sauce in one.
I suspect this is far less mathematically rigorous than what Hannah Fry had in mind, but it works: my version of applied math in the kitchen.
Yotam Ottolenghi is a writer and the chef-owner of the Ottolenghi restaurants, Nopi and Rovi, in London. He is an Eat columnist for The New York Times Magazine and writes a weekly column for The Guardian’s Feast Magazine.
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