We had pot roast Sunday nights. It had to be a weekend night, because Mama was a teacher, and a roast wouldn’t get done until time for supper on a school night. Saturday night was steak-and-martini night for the ‘rental units,’ as we lovingly referred to our parents. The kids ate Vienna sausages and noodles with butter and Parmesan cheese from a can. I loved it. So anyway, that left Sunday night for pot roast.

It’s hard to pick one favorite thing about pot roast. I even liked the onions. They got really soft — you could almost see through them. Mama peeled the carrots, but left them long. I liked them when one part had been stuck up out of the broth. That part got really sweet and chewy — almost crisp — while the part of the carrot that cooked in the broth was soft and beefy tasting from the jus it had absorbed. The same thing happened to the potatoes — little waxy ones that mama peeled, so the outsides got crusty and brown.

The beef itself I saw little of. Daddy doled it out, morsel by succulent morsel, so tender and moist, it almost melted in your mouth. Poor Daddy, as head of a household of four women, he rightly believed that he deserved the Lord’s portion of protein.

I didn’t mind. My favorite part was actually the gravy. I called it juice. Mama didn’t thicken it, so it was really like a broth. Here’s the best part: the store-bought loaf of sliced white bread stacked high like the leaning tower in the middle of our knotty pine kitchen table. That’s what sopped up the juice like a delicious floppy sponge. That was before we learned that stacked white bread was considered white trash, and Mama moved on to popovers and even Yorkshire pudding, but the white bread was OK by me.

“Put some meat on that little girl’s bones, she’s bound to blow away,” that’s what Mama was told about me when I was little. Sunday night pot roast and that stack of white bread did the trick.

Pot Roast

Serves 4 - 6

3 lb. chuck roast
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
3 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup red wine
1 to 2 quarts beef stock
3 onions, peeled and quartered
4 or so small way potatoes, peeled and quartered
4 medium carrots, peeled (sliced lengthwise if really fat)

Preheat oven to 325. Rinse the pot roast and pat dry. Mix the flour with the salt and pepper. Dredge the roast in the flour mixture on both sides.

Heat the olive oil in a Dutch oven and brown the roast on both sides. Remove the roast and add the wine, then 1 quart of the stock. Add the roast back in, along with the vegetables. Bring the liquid to a simmer, cover and place in the oven. Cook for 3 hours. Remove the lid and cook one hour more. Taste for seasoning before serving.