Rukmini Iyer – Food for Thought
Anyone who has wasted hours of their life in the kitchen, beaded with sweat as they prepare an ornate risotto or a slow-cooked stew, will know that a rollicking time with their guests will have to wait till the end of the night. Is it any surprise then, that the “fuss-free” Roasting Tin series by Rukmini Iyer has now made over a million sales? After all, it is premised on the satisfyingly simplistic formula of chop it all up, bung in a tin, go and join your guests in yuletide merriment and let the oven polish off the job.
Iyer shot to the limelight with her debut book The Roasting Tin: Simple One Dish Dinners which was centred on her raison d’etre of “minimum effort with maximum return”. Since then, she has written The Green Roasting Tin, The Quick Roasting Tin, The Roasting Tin around the World, The Green Barbecue and most recently, The Sweet Roasting Tin. Her candy-coloured books now line the shelves of many kitchens.
Iyer grew up in Peterborough, where she spent her early years making fairy cakes and stirring béchamel sauce with her mother by her side. “She was always a bit anxious but very happy for us to pitch in and learn,” explains Iyer. “In the long holidays, my sister and I would read all the cookbooks and set up a project where we would make a three-course meal for our parents and take turns in how would be head or sous chef.” When Iyer was 16, she bought the culinary bibles of How to Eat by Nigella Lawson and The Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver and “had never read anything quite like it.”
While studying English Literature at Edinburgh University, Iyer fell in with a very “foodie” crowd. “We were five girls in one flat and we’d all cook together in the evenings and invite people over for everything from traybakes to scones, to Nigella’s chocolate raspberry cake.” Iyer was then accepted for a legal training contract and studied for a two-year law conversion course. She was just about to head off to a law firm but failed to reach the marks she needed to secure her place in one of her two tests. Instead, she headed for Edinburgh New Town Cookery School. “It was like being in a Harry Potter film,” she jokes, “everyone had their own workstation – just like potions class.”
After assisting on a food shoot during cookery school, Iyer realised that her long-term aim was to pursue food styling. “I wanted to move back to London to find styling work and to work with lots of established stylists so I could help them and learn by osmosis. Food styling couldn’t be more different than working in a law office. It’s almost like hanging out with friends for a day, and it’s an incredibly creative and collaborative environment.”
The concept behind the Roasting Tin series would come to Rukmini Iyer after long nights working as a food stylist. “Working as a stylist I was on my feet all day so when I got home, I wanted something to eat quickly, that took as little effort as a ready meal but was still fresh. I started making a ton of traybakes as I had been ghost-writing books, I began coming up with recipes that took minimum effort.”
“I remember doing the research and seeing there was nothing else like it in the market. There are lots of “one pot” dishes recipes but so often they’re not because you have to brown the beef in a saucepan and so on. I decided that If I was going to do this, all the recipes I came up with would have to all be done in one tray.”
Iyer began short-circuiting her way around recipes like stews and curries so that they could be roasted or grilled in one layer. She also decided it was important that her first book (and the ones thereafter) included helpful infographics on how to build your own meal with whatever you have in the fridge. And, that there should be maps that outlined all the crunchy, salty and zingy elements she wanted to add in a meal alongside your staple vegetables, proteins and carbohydrates.
In 2017, she published the bright-yellow The Roasting Tin: One Dish Dinners which included 75 recipes including steam-roasted salmon and broccoli with lime, ginger, garlic and chilli; Roast chicken with fennel, lemon, shallots, garlic and mustard mayo and crispy baked gnocchi with tomatoes, basil, mozzarella & pine nuts. Iyer would later release The Green Roasting Tin and Green Barbecue to cater for vegetarians, vegans and for those looking to eat more plant-based meals.
In 2020, Iyer went globetrotting with Roasting Tin Around the World – a collection of recipes from her travels to Singapore, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam and the US. With recipes like slow-cooked pork pibil with pink pickled onions, s’mores rocky road with peanuts, marshmallows and chocolate and slow-roasted peppers with chilli, lemon and garlic beans, Iyer aimed to transport the pandemic-fatigued, one bite at a time.
Her most recently published book The Sweet Roasting Tin does what it says on the, well, tin. “I love baking and I came up with the idea to have one basic recipe per chapter, and then everything else would be a variation,” she explains. In the book, there are 75 recipes that can be made in standard baking tin formats.
The book covers all of the baking bases, from chapters on traybakes, brownies, tarts and cobblers, to gluten-free, vegan and diabetic-friendly recipes. The recipes range from nostalgic favourites with a twist like the sticky date gingerbread to savoury recipes like chilli-spiked savoury muffins and saffron-scented banana bread and recipes from Iyer’s own childhood like the pineapple upside-down cake and the coconut burfi.
For Iyer’s last ever supper, she picks a “mixed starter” selection that includes her “mother’s cauliflower pakoras with homemade coriander chutney”, “street food chaat with tamarind sauce” and some “pani purris.” For her main course, Iyer chooses “pilau rice with cashew nuts fried in butter and a cauliflower curry with cream, chilli and ginger.” For her dessert, “the pineapple upside-down cake” and to drink, “some champagne followed by some nice white wine.”
It seems Sweet Roasting Tin is yet another notch on Iyer’s belt. The inimitable chef has offered up a series that has truly brought cooking to the masses with recipes that cater for even the fussiest of eaters. As Nigella Lawson once wrote of one of Rukmini’s books, they have truly “earnt a place in kitchens up and down the country.”
So, considering the mammoth success of the series, is there due to be another addition to the Roasting Tin family? ‘I don’t think I could do another one,” admits an exhausted-sounding Iyer who is expecting her first baby, “but I am working on an Indian book which will have the same principles of Roasting Tin and that is likely to be out toward the end of 2022.”
Rukmini Iyer’s recipe for Baked Mascarpone, Cherry and Walnut Brownies
Ingredients
85ml olive oil
125g soft dark brown sugar
50g dark chocolate
90ml milk
2 medium free-range eggs
40g cocoa powder
60g ground almonds
A pinch of sea salt flakes
230g jarred black cherries in kirsch (drained weight)
150g mascarpone
50g chopped walnuts
Method
You will need a: 24.5cm x 17.5cm baking tin
Preheat the oven to 160°C fan/180°C/gas 4. Measure the olive oil, sugar and chocolate into a saucepan, then stir over a low heat until the chocolate has melted and the mixture is glossy.
Stir in 70ml of the milk, then let the mixture cool for 5–10 minutes before whisking in the eggs.
Stir the cocoa powder, ground almonds, sea salt and half the jarred cherries into the liquid mixture.
Beat the mascarpone with the remaining 20ml of milk until smooth, and set aside.
Pour the batter into a lined 24.5cm x 17.5cm baking tin, and drop in teaspoons of the beaten mascarpone. Use the handle of the teaspoon to draw the mascarpone gently through the chocolate mixture, then scatter over the remaining cherries and the chopped walnuts.
Transfer the tin to the oven and bake for 20–25 minutes, until the top of the brownie looks just set. Let the brownie cool in the tin for 5minutes before transferring it gently to a wire rack.
Serve warm: if made in advance, you can gently reheat in the oven for 5 minutes at 160°C fan/180°C/gas 4. Store any leftovers in the fridge.