All the foreigners I have met (and there are many) have a staggering number of misunderstandings about Britain, especially British food.

Almost everyone said that it is not good to eat in the UK. A Mallorcan friend said that he had been to London several times and had never had a good meal there.

I sneered at him, saying that if you don't eat well in London, it's because you don't want to eat well. I always rank the best British food in the top six in the world.

The vast majority of foreigners make another major mistake: They think roast beef is the national dish of the United Kingdom. It is not and never has been. Roast beef, especially in Tudor England in the 15th and 16th centuries, was always expensive, and only the nobles could afford it.

Beef Baron, made from two pieces of sirloin joined on the spine, was once served in the most stately mansion-and only on special occasions.

Before Prince Albert married Queen Victoria and introduced German traditions such as Christmas trees, and before Dickens helped popularize many of these novelties (including roast turkey), the elite enjoyed roast beef as a main course on Christmas Day.

But the huge roasted turkey on the Christmas table became the hallmark of all Christmas delicacies, and even pushed the beef baron aside. However, there are still some people who have eaten roast beef at some point during the 12 days of Christmas. About 30 years ago at Christmas, I made a grilled rib for this family, which I ordered from a Scottish butcher that has a store in Can Pastilla.

He made a beautiful piece of beef, weighing about 6 pounds, cut the chin, and prepared it to go into the oven. I didn't do anything with that joint, just smeared it with a lot of lard, sprinkled it with freshly ground black pepper, and bake it in the oven at full speed for a fairly short time.

This is one of the best, least stressful and easiest family Christmas dinners I have ever cooked. I want to make another roast beef this year, but things will be simpler: a piece of Angus entrecôte, which will be roasted in about half an hour, and carved beautifully with my sharp long Japanese sashimi knife.

Some people are best at roasting any kind of meat, while others make a mess of it. But this does not mean that the art of baking is our innate talent. It is not in our genes, although French food writer Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) seems to think so.

Brillat-Savarin is a magistrate. He wrote "The Philosopher in the Kitchen", which is a collection of memories and reflections on the art of cooking and eating. He published many stupid food statements in his time about roasting. Motto is one of them.

He wrote that a person can learn to be a chef, but he must be born a roaster. In some places, such as many places in Spain, the art of roasting meat in a wood-burning oven is passed on from father to son, and mother to daughter. But this is not done through genes: it is done through word of mouth and observation.

If we have basic expertise and rich experience, all of us can become barbecue experts. The latter is the most important. Most of us don't grill meat often-this inevitably means that we are not good at grilling meat.

When roasting a piece of meat, you must understand what is happening in the oven and the effect of heat on the meat. A piece of animal meat is composed of bundles of muscle fibers, and collagen is nature's glue.

When the meat is heated to 70C and above, no matter what method is used, three changes will begin to occur. First, the muscle fibers contract, causing the flesh to contract. This causes the internal juice to rise to the surface.

When roasting in a hot oven, the juice beads squeezed to the top and above are exposed to high temperature and dry immediately. This results in a very delicious concentrated juice crust.

The juices pressed on the bottom of the meat will not be exposed to the intense heat of the oven, so they will not turn into a crust, but will slowly drip into the roasting pan.

But those delicious juices are not lost. The chefs discovered long ago that the thick black liquid at the bottom of the baking pan was full of flavor, so they retrieved it. This is how gravy was invented.

By adding broth or wine to the roasting tank, scraping off the lumps and dissolving them, we rehydrate the dried gravy and turn them into a rich-tasting gravy. Good gravy requires gravy, which is why the artificial mixture extracted from the packaging can only be a pale shade of the real thing.

Obviously, the meat must be roasted in a very hot oven. If the temperature is not high enough, the juice will simply roll off the meat and enter the grill pan. The meat will not have a flavor-rich crust, which gives the roasted meat a unique taste.

This is why we should never roast a good piece of meat with tin foil. When the juice rises to the surface, the tin foil protects them from the heat, and they will slide to the bottom of the tin foil package.

Then the juice emits steam instead of forming a crust, and the meat is steamed instead of grilled. We only have a piece of meat left, losing a lot of its flavor and not compensating for the delicious coating of dry concentrated juice.

Thirty years ago, when I made that sizable vertical rib roast, I fry all surfaces in a very hot paella pan to form the crust as quickly as possible to avoid excessive juice loss.

I only bake for 40 minutes. I didn't bake it even once, and I didn't even open the oven door to take a look. This is very rare and absolutely full of flavor. I added a small amount of red wine to the pot and scraped off every bit of caramel juice.

I ordered French fries, fried Brussels sprouts with butter, cauliflower with Beckham sauce and delicious pot sauce. This is one of the best Christmas lunches I have ever made.

I learned an unusual way many years ago from Sally Wilson, wife of the Daily Mirror sports writer Peter Wilson. I cooked potatoes absolutely delicious with a variety of roasts. He spent his retirement in Caldera. years.

Sally put the peeled potatoes in cold brine and slowly boiled them. She immediately took the potatoes out of the water and let them cool by themselves.

About an hour and a half before the potatoes were needed, Sally began to fry the potatoes. Put cold potatoes in an electric frying pan half full of hot oil. I use a suitable wok and the necessary amount of extra virgin olive oil.

The potatoes are fried in very hot oil for five minutes, turning once every minute or so. Turn the heat to lowest, and the potatoes were fried at this very low temperature for 10 minutes, turning them frequently. Then increase the heat for 7-8 minutes, and then return to the lowest temperature.

This process will repeat for about 90 minutes, during which time each potato has a thick golden shell. It is the upper and lower temperatures of the oil that ultimately form the thick crust. When you pierce the skin with a sharp knife, the potato meat is creamy and soft.

But this method cannot be rushed. If you try to reduce the frying time and changing oil temperature, thick crust will not form.

My daughter tasted Sally's potatoes for the first time when she was 12 years old and liked them very much, but none of the two lamb shanks she cooks every year can replicate them. She tried to complete the process in 30 minutes instead of 90 minutes, and ended up with very ordinary French fries. They are very edible, but they don't have the thick golden shell of Sally at all.

In addition to my daughter, I have two Mallorcan friends who make lamb shanks on one of the 12 days of Christmas. Because I prefer my roast lamb to be undercooked (very pink, like the French do) I give it exactly 10 minutes per half kilo in a very hot oven, then cool it in the oven for another 15 minutes, turn off the heat ,open the door.

This means that a 1.5 kg leg of lamb will only be roasted in a very hot oven for 30 minutes, which is too little for most people. The calf is medium finish, but the rest is indeed pink. Most of my British and American friends prefer 25 minutes per half kilogram.

But lamb is a versatile meat that is very delicious when roasted rare or medium, and as far as my Spanish friend is concerned, it roasts very well.

Those Spanish chefs who roast lamb in a wood-burning oven at low temperatures sometimes use two hours of roasting time, which includes a lot of oiling. When the meat is grilled at a low temperature, more juice will eventually enter the grill pan, which requires constant oiling. Spanish chefs use a special mixture to coat the leg of lamb to ensure juiciness.

This baking mixture consists of wine vinegar (and sometimes fresh orange juice) plus dried and fresh herbs of your choice. Since the leg of lamb (or a quarter of the lamb carcass) is roasted at a very gentle rate, spoon some of this mixture every 10 minutes or so. When the lamb is ready (two hours in the oven is normal), the pan juice is really thin and can be eaten as a gravy.

When you eat lamb grilled in Spanish style at a friend’s house, you always get juicy pieces of meat. But I have never ordered roast lamb in a restaurant because it was often grilled (and re-roasted) to a certain extent in the past. No meat can be roasted so much and still delicious.

As I said at the beginning, animal meat is composed of muscle fibers, and collagen is nature's glue. If the meat is cooked for any length of time, the collagen will dissolve and the fibers will separate-we will leave a lot of sticky and tasteless meat.

However, if the meat is grilled at a high temperature for a short time, or at a low temperature for a long time with a large amount of spreading, this will not happen on Sunday or Christmas barbecues.

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