Pot Roast
Take a meaty piece of beef-cross rib or shoulder-weighing 3 pounds or more. Melt a little fat in a pan and in this quickly brown all sides of the meat. Transfer to a kettle, rinsing into it the brown from the frying-pan with a little hot water. Add 1 pint of boiling water, I small onion stuck with 2 cloves, a bit of bay leaf and 1 scant teaspoonful of salt. Cover and simmer very slowly, allowing thirty minutes for each pound. Add enough browned flour to slightly thicken the gravy and strain it into a bowl.
A plain braise with almost nothing in it, which means the two things that matter are the sear and the length of the simmer. The original's timing is the one figure worth ignoring.
- Cook to tenderness, not to the clockThirty minutes per pound gives a 3-lb roast only 90 minutes, which is enough to cook the meat through but not enough to break down the connective tissue in chuck or cross rib. Plan on 3 to 3 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, and judge by a fork sliding in with no resistance.
- The cuts"Cross rib" is the chuck cross-rib roast, sold today as chuck roast, shoulder roast or blade roast. Any of them works; all are collagen-rich and want long, wet, low heat.
- KettleHere a kettle means a deep lidded pot, not a tea kettle. A heavy Dutch oven is the modern equivalent, and it lets you brown and braise in the same vessel — skip the transfer and simply deglaze with the hot water.
- Browned flourFlour toasted in a dry pan until nut-coloured, which gives roast-gravy flavour but roughly half the thickening power of raw flour. Figure about 2 tablespoons for the pint of liquid, slaked with cold water into a smooth slurry before it goes in.
- Liquid and heatA pint of water does not cover the meat, and should not. Keep the lid on, hold the pot at a bare simmer with the liquid barely moving, and turn the roast once or twice so the exposed side does not dry.
- SaltOne scant teaspoon for 3 lb of beef plus a pint of liquid is light by current taste. Salt the surface of the meat before browning and correct the strained gravy at the end.
- StrainingStrain out the onion, cloves and bay before serving — cloves left whole in the gravy are unpleasant to bite into. Skim the fat from the surface first if there is much of it.
- YieldA 3-lb roast serves five or six, with about a cup and a half of gravy. Let the meat rest ten minutes before slicing across the grain.
Pot roast is the American name for a technique older than the phrase: a tough working cut of beef browned for colour, then simmered in a covered pot until the collagen softens into gelatin. The technique turns the cheapest quarter of the animal — shoulder and the ribs nearest it — into something that carves and yields gravy, with no more seasoning than an onion, two cloves, a scrap of bay and salt. The clove-studded onion is a habit generally traced to French kitchen practice, where the same trick flavours stocks and braises, and it survives in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American manuals as shorthand for aromatics when a household kept few spices. Browned flour, once a staple of the pantry and often toasted in quantity and kept in a jar, has largely dropped out of home cooking, though it persists in the darker roux of Louisiana.