Roast as a verb, meant originally to cook by exposure to radiant heat. It occupied the apex of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘culinary triangle’ (the base line of which stretched from boiled to smoked). It was the least mediated form of cooking, the simplest, the most primitive and, in his eyes, most often undertaken by men while the ‘cultural’ method of boiling is the preserve of womankind. Roasting began by holding a piece of meat on a stick or spit near the open flame and its development over many centuries has not moved far from that principle, even if the accoutrements—the spits and the managed fire—have greatly improved.
