The Roast Post
My grandmother, Suzanne Simonin Potter, or as I call her, Grandma Sue, has slowly but surely declined into dementia over the course of the last decade. While lacking short-term memory, she has no difficulty identifying Gima when we look through family photos. “That’s my mother-in-law!” is the usual exclamation that accompanies a Gima sighting. I am fortunate to have a few original copies of At Home on the Range, including Grandma Sue’s. Gima inscribed the book in her distinctive hand: “For Susie so that she need never hear again about how ‘mother used to cook’!” It was the only cookbook to grace her kitchen.
Grandma Sue’s copy is well used, if not necessarily well loved. The linen boards long ago parted from their binding; the end papers are covered in my grandmother’s careful, copperplate notes. POT ROAST, p. 34, is underlined in pencil. Gima’s accompanying introduction describes it as my grandfather’s favorite, so it makes sense that this, of all recipes, received Grandma Sue’s dutiful attention. The corner is folded over; the pages are splattered. These are telltale signs of good eating to come.
My grandfather, Grampa Shel, was a career naval officer, and much of At Home on the Range was written while he was at sea during WWII. While Gima herself says, “we’re not…a sentimental family”, Pot Roast à la mode Sentimentale is the closest she comes to sentimental in any of her writing. This pot roast makes me a bit sentimental, too. Unlike my cousin Liz, I didn’t grow up on Gima’s food. It doesn’t evoke homey memories of family dinners and reminiscences of our shared great grandmother. The double whammy of Gima’s death and my grandparents’ divorce effectively severed my father—and thus me—from the Potter family for the next thirty years. I suspect that Grandma Sue’s interest in making pot roast died not long after her marriage. Subsequently, my youth was pot-roast free.
I would love to tell you that this pot roast will change your life, or bring your youngster home safe from the war, as Gima seems to have believed. I think the strength of this pot roast isn’t so much the unique flavor as the memories that Gima and each subsequent generation has come to equate it with. It is hard to go wrong when you soak meat in good wine, brown it in fat, and cook the crap out of it.
My greatest culinary interest in Gima’s pot roast was her direction to brown the meat in suet. I knew of suet only as those odd white blocks covered in seed that you’re supposed to put outside for tiny birds in need of bulking up. Tiny birds in Baltimore steal puffer jackets from preemies, so there’s no need for it here. I found “beef kidney suet” in a corner of the Wegman’s frozen foods section that I had overlooked on my 8000 previous visits. It was cheap and disturbing looking. Turns out, suet is the fat surrounding the kidney. How unpleasant.
What to do with this giant, foul blob of hard fat resembling Spock’s pained alien friend, the horta? Mind melding with the suet didn’t work, so I went with Google. I decided that grating it was going to be nasty, and opted for rendering. I stuck it in a saucepan, turned it on low, and hoped for the best. It took a good thirty minutes for all of the fat to melt away from the remaining bits of sinew? Cartilage? Vein? I don’t know, and don’t want to know. I tipped those gray bits down the disposal and ground them up. Gima probably had some recipe, somewhere, that made good use of those cow nubbins for marmalade or a meat paste.
I poured the melted suet, now tallow, into an ice cube tray, calling to mind a 1970s family craft night of candle making, and reserved Gima’s requested four ounces for browning. And brown I did. The resulting smell of the suety Maillard reaction was so tantalizing, in fact, that I thought, “Why not brown the vegetables, too?” Well, here’s why: dumping cold, slightly damp vegetables into boiling hot kidney fat results in a greasy splatter which will blister and burn whatever exposed flesh is nearby. Two weeks later, I am still picking flakes of scorched skin from my forearm. But my pot roast suet burn is one little connection to a Potter past I once longed for, and leads me to wonder what might have been.
