Home › Village Receipts › A Good Pot Roast
A Good Pot Roast
Place in an earthen pot and cover well about four pounds of trimmed brisket of beef wiped clean, to be put down and cooked in its own juice. When very near done salt and pepper and cover up again until done. Can be baked in oven or on top of stove. When done take out and add boiling water to make gravy and enough flour for thickening.
— Mrs. F. P. Bush
A dry braise: no liquid goes in at the start, so the pot has to be tight enough to keep the beef's own moisture from escaping. That seal is the whole recipe.
- The vesselAn "earthen pot" with a well-fitting cover is a lidded stoneware bean pot or covered casserole. A heavy Dutch oven does the same job; if the lid is loose, lay a sheet of parchment or foil under it before covering.
- No added waterNothing is poured in until the meat is cooked. A 4 lb brisket will throw off a surprising amount of liquid over several hours, but only if the heat stays low and the steam stays in. Resist lifting the lid to check.
- Temperature and timeFor the oven, 300-325F. A trimmed 4 lb brisket needs roughly 3.5 to 4 hours, and is done when a fork slides in and twists free with no resistance -- around 200-205F internally, well past the point where a steak would be ruined.
- On top of the stoveUse the lowest burner setting and a diffuser or trivet if you have one. Earthenware in particular will crack over direct flame; heat it gradually and never set a hot pot on a cold wet surface.
- Trimmed brisketLeave a quarter inch of fat on for a dry braise like this one -- with no liquid in the pot, that fat is the basting.
- Salting at the endThe instruction to salt only when "very near done" may reflect the once-common belief that early salt draws out juices. Current practice is the reverse: salt the meat an hour ahead or the night before, which seasons it through rather than just the surface.
- The gravyBoiling water is added to the pot juices, then flour for thickening. Work the flour into a little of the fat first, or slake it in cold water, or it will go lumpy in the hot liquid. About 2 tablespoons flour per cup of liquid gives a pouring gravy.
- YieldFour pounds of brisket, sliced across the grain, serves six to eight.
Pot roasting is what cooks did with the cuts that could not be roasted: brisket, chuck, rump -- muscle full of connective tissue that needs hours of gentle moist heat to turn to gelatin. It was also a fuel-saving method, a covered pot pushed to the back of a wood range or set in the cooling brick oven after the bread came out; this receipt offers the oven or the stovetop indifferently. The earthenware is not decorative either: clay holds heat evenly and forgivingly, a real virtue when the only thermostat is the cook's hand. Receipts of this kind tend to be recorded in the shorthand of cooks who assumed the reader already knew what a good pot roast looked like -- hence four pounds of beef, a covered pot, and no times or temperatures at all.