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Pot Roast of Beef With Browned Potatoes
Wipe beef with damp cheesecloth, put into iron kettle or frying pan, and sear well on all sides. Add 2 tablespoons cut onion, 1 tablespoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and 2 cups boiling water; reduce heat and boil slowly 1 3/4 hours; add water as it boils away, 1 cup at a time. After adding potatoes, boil 30 minutes. Place meat in center of hot platter and potatoes around edge. Mix 1 tablespoon flour with a little cold water, add to gravy and boil. If not brown enough, add 1 tablespoon caramel. Pour over meat and sprinkle with chopped parsley. Carrots cut in small pieces may be added with potatoes if desired.
A plain braise written in the shorthand of the period: the cut, its weight and the number of potatoes are all left to the cook. Assume a 3-4 lb piece of chuck, rump or bottom round and 6-8 medium potatoes, peeled and left whole or halved.
- Sear hard, then keep it at a bare simmerThe whole character of the dish rests on a deep brown crust before any liquid goes in, then liquid that never truly boils. "Boil slowly" in a 1920s book means what we call a simmer, around 190-200F, with the surface barely moving; a rolling boil for two hours squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you dry, stringy meat in a thin broth.
- The panAn iron kettle is a heavy lidded Dutch oven. Cast iron or enamelled cast iron does the same job; a thin skillet will scorch the fond and boil the liquid too fast. Keep it covered once the water goes in.
- Time and temperatureOne and three-quarter hours plus thirty is enough for a modest piece, but connective tissue in chuck usually wants closer to three hours. Test by feel rather than clock: a fork should turn in the meat with no resistance. The dish can also go into a 325F oven, covered, instead of onto the burner.
- SaltA full tablespoon is a great deal of salt, though it is going into a large roast and two cups of liquid that will reduce. With modern fine table salt, start with two teaspoons and correct the gravy at the end, after reduction has concentrated it.
- PotatoesDespite the title, nothing here browns the potatoes; they poach in the braising liquid. If you want them browned, roast them separately or brown them in the rendered fat before returning them to the pot for the last half hour.
- CaramelNot confectioner's caramel but burnt-sugar browning, sold then in bottles and now as gravy browning or a commercial browning sauce. A teaspoon of soy sauce or a spoonful of the pan fond scraped up will do the same work; the ingredient exists purely for colour.
- ThickeningA single tablespoon of flour slaked in cold water gives a thin, glossy jus rather than a thick gravy. Double it if you want body, and let it boil a full minute to cook out the raw starch.
- YieldA 3-4 lb pot roast with potatoes serves six to eight, and reheats better the next day than it eats the first.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of the promotional cookbooks issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which distributed such booklets very widely in the early twentieth century to keep its tin in American pantries. Pot roasting itself is older than the stove it is cooked on: a tough, cheap cut, seared for flavour and then held for hours in a small amount of liquid in a covered iron pot, is the method that made chuck and rump edible, and it is close kin to the French boeuf a la mode without the wine and larding. Bottled caramel colouring, or gravy browning, was a familiar grocery item by the early 1900s.