Robert Warwick
POT ROAST
A 4 lb. piece of beef 3 large carrots cut in half 6 onions 1 bay leaf 8 potatoes 1 piece of suet Put suet in a pot and cook slowly until partly melted.
Then put in the roast with a good sprinkling of pepper and salt and the bay leaf.
Cook slowly for about two hours, then add the vegetables, a cup of water, and cook until they are tender. Remove all from pot and make a thick brown gravy with a little flour.
I also love Hungarian goulash, which is ever so much like this, only the meat is first cut up in squares. My favorite dessert is strawberry shortcake, and in my leisure moments I have made some that was pretty good. Yours truly,
A plain braise: a chuck-sized piece of beef cooked slowly in its own fat with root vegetables added late. The instructions are thin in the way celebrity-contributed recipes usually are, so a few things need filling in.
- The stray heading"FROG'S LEGS FRICASSEED a la HENRY" appears to be a run-on line from an adjacent entry in the original book, not part of this dish. The recipe proper is the pot roast that follows.
- Which cutA 4 lb "piece of beef" for two hours of slow pot cooking means a collagen-rich cut: chuck, blade, brisket or bottom round. A lean roasting joint will be dry and stringy by the time the potatoes are done.
- The suetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and often frozen. Here it is rendered to give a shallow pool of hot fat in the bottom of the pot; drippings, lard or a neutral oil do the same job.
- The step the recipe skipsNothing tells you to brown the meat. If you want a darker gravy, get the fat properly hot and sear all sides before the long slow cooking; as written, the dish will finish paler than a modern pot roast.
- "Cook slowly"On a modern hob, the lowest setting with the lid on; if you prefer the oven, a low one (roughly 300-325F) will do the same. The pot should barely tick over, not boil.
- LiquidOnly one cup of water goes in, and only with the vegetables. This is closer to a covered dry braise than a stew, so the lid must be tight-fitting or the pot will scorch. Check once during the first two hours and add a splash if it has gone dry.
- VegetablesWhole onions and halved carrots want 45 minutes to an hour; the eight potatoes, if left whole, need about the same. Cut them to a size that will finish together rather than adding everything at once.
- The gravy"A thick brown gravy with a little flour" means a roux made in the emptied pot: stir flour into the remaining fat, cook it until it smells nutty, then whisk in the pan juices plus stock or water. Roughly two tablespoons of flour per cup of liquid.
- YieldFour pounds of beef with eight potatoes feeds six to eight, and cold leftovers slice cleanly the next day.
This comes from a genre of book that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: collections of recipes solicited from stage and screen performers, sold partly as cookery and largely as celebrity access. Robert Warwick was a leading man of the silent era who went on to a long career in character parts, and his contribution reads exactly like a letter rather than a tested formula, complete with a digression about goulash, a closing note on strawberry shortcake and a signature. The dish itself is straightforward American pot roast, a familiar treatment for a cheap cut. His observation that Hungarian goulash is "ever so much like this, only the meat is first cut up in squares" is a fair working description of the difference between a braise and a stew, though a Hungarian cook would add that the paprika matters rather more than the knife work.