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Celery (Salt and pepper Try out pork)
3 lbs. beef from lower part of round or face of rump. 2 thin slices fat salt pork. 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns. Onion. 1/4 cup each, cut in dice. Salt and pepper Try out pork and remove scraps. Wipe meat, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and brown entire surface in pork fat. When turning meat, avoid piercing with fork or skewer, which allows the inner juices to escape. Place on trivet in deep granite pan or in earthen puddingdish, and surround with vegetables, peppercorns, and three cups boiling water; cover closely, and bake four hours in very slow oven, basting every half-hour, and turning after second hour. Throughout the cooking, the liquid should be kept below the boiling-point. Serve with Horseradish Sauce, or with sauce made from liquor in pan.
This is the tail end of a braised beef recipe — the ingredient list has been cut off mid-line, so the vegetables and the cut of meat are left to the cook. Treat it as a pot roast method: a 4-5 lb chuck, round or rump roast, an onion, two carrots, a stalk or two of celery, and a few peppercorns will fill the frame the instructions describe.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerThe instruction to hold the liquid under the boiling point through the whole four hours is the point of the method. Connective tissue in a working cut converts slowly to gelatin over a long hold above roughly 160F, and that conversion is what makes the meat tender; the hotter the meat gets, the more moisture the fibres lose, so a hard boil tends to give dry, stringy meat even in a pan full of liquid.
- "Very slow oven"250-275F. A slow oven is 300F, moderate 350F; "very slow" is the lowest usable setting in a wood or coal range. Check the pot after the first hour and drop the temperature if the liquid is bubbling rather than trembling.
- "Try out pork"Render diced salt pork or fatback in the pan over low heat until the fat runs and the cubes turn crisp; those cubes are the "scraps" you remove. Two ounces gives enough fat to brown the roast. Bacon fat or oil substitutes without complaint.
- Granite panGraniteware was enamelled sheet steel, speckled grey — the ordinary cheap roasting pan of the period. Any heavy covered Dutch oven or lidded roaster works; the earthen pudding dish suggested as an alternative is essentially a covered casserole.
- The trivetKeeping the meat up out of the liquid means it braises in steam rather than boiling. A folded rack, a few thick onion slices, or a metal trivet all do the job. Three cups of water in a snug pot should come nowhere near the top of the roast.
- Turning without piercingThe advice to use tongs or two spoons rather than a fork is sound, though the reason given is doubtful: a fork hole seems to lose very little juice. What piercing does cost is some of the browned crust, which contributes flavour to the finished sauce.
- BastingEvery half-hour for four hours means opening the oven eight times and losing heat each time. With a tight lid the meat self-bastes; two or three checks are enough, mainly to confirm the liquid is not boiling and has not cooked dry.
- Doneness and yieldFour hours is a guide, not a rule. The roast is ready when a skewer slides in with no resistance — internal temperature around 200F for a chuck. A 4 lb roast serves six, with pan liquor enough for a gravy thickened with a tablespoon of flour worked into butter.
This is the standard American pot roast as the Boston Cooking School taught it: a tough, cheap cut given four hours of gentle moist heat to convert its collagen. The detail that dates it most precisely is the fuel. Trying out the pork, then holding a coal or wood range at its lowest steady heat for an afternoon, was work that a gas oven with a thermostat later made trivial. The warning against piercing the meat with a fork is one of the great persistent kitchen beliefs, repeated in cookbooks for well over a century and never quite supported by measurement.