Gotham Diary:
Rosbif
3 June 2013
In the household I grew up in, meat was judged by the amount of time that it took to cook it. Quickly-cooked meats were prized; slow-cooking meats were shunned. It’s for this reason that I have never tasted pot roast. Nor, until quite recently, did I understand where the beef in a roast beef sandwich comes from. I still have no idea what “bottom round” signifies. Mark Bittman’s recipe for Off-Oven Roast Beef, published in the Times Magazine on 20 January, calls for “1 beef roast, top, eye or bottom round, approximately 3 pounds,” so I went to Fairway and found one. (Fairway seems always to have eyes and bottoms, but no tops.) Picking it up and putting it into my shopping cart, I felt that I was taking a big step in my mastery of cuisine, about forty years late.
On Sunday, I roasted a piece of bottom round for the third time this year, slathering it in a sloppy goo of garlic that I had run through a small food processor with sea salt and peppercorns. The roast weighed 2.71 pounds, so I multiplied that by five and got thirteen and a half minutes. Bittman’s rule is that you put the meat in a 500º oven for five minutes for every pound, and then you turn the oven off and leave the roast undisturbed for two hours — by which time my oven, at any rate, cools down almost completely. The fragrance of garlicky meat blasted the apartment for about an hour, and it would have been insanely appetizing if we had not had a big breakfast.
Rather late in the evening — Kathleen had been pottering in her closets, and I’d been lost in the last pages of The Unwinding — I decided to make dinner after all. I’d been toying with going across the street for Mexican, as we often do on Sunday evening. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to cook. I just wasn’t sure that I was up to inventing something worth eating. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of meat salads for decades, but recipes are hard to find, and they generally rely too heavily on tomatoes. Dressings never seem quite right. I have also learned, by error and trial, that greens — cooked beans especially — introduce an unpleasant note of chlorophyll. I had it in mind to make a dinner salad with wild rice, stewed tomatoes, and thinly-sliced beef, but the details were unclear. I had another glass of wine and listened to Kathleen’s music. Then I got off my duff and went into the kitchen.
Aside from an ear of corn, which I stripped into a small frying pan and sizzled for a few minutes, everything that went into the salad was already cooked. The rice had been sitting in a bag in the refrigerator for some time, but it was still good — very good. I shook out an amount that seemed right. I quartered four stewed grape tomatoes. I minced three green onions. I chopped the contents of a rather small bottle (Fairway brand) of artichoke hearts. I stirred in the warm corn. Then I turned to the dressing. I combined a little less than a tablespoon of sour cream, a little more than a tablespoon of mayonnaise, and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard with a splash of lime vinegar, and stopped right there, mindful that the salad ingredients were already variously seasoned. Finally, I sliced the beef, which fell from the spinning blade in shreds. I tossed the salad well, and let it sit for about half an hour, or slightly longer than it took to compose the salad.
This is the second time that I’ve written down my recipe for Rosbif Salad; I was careful to do so last night, after dinner, in my kitchen notebook.
***
On Saturday night, we went to see the new apartment of an old friend who recently inherited some very fine furniture, paintings, and other lovely things. I have been in a few “fabulous” New York apartments over the years, but never in one filled with objects of museum grade. The rooms were spacious and uncrowded. There was plenty to look at, but no need to see much of it at any given time. The understated opulence was curative, deeply refreshing. My admiration was untainted by envy, because the meanest thing at our friend’s was finer than the best thing that home had to offer: there was simply no overlap. The question, wouldn’t I like to live in such splendor, had a way of not quite coming up. I might visit with pleasure, but I would never belong in such surroundings. Thirty years ago, when our friend was already collecting nice things, I was rattled by competitive urges, and it took rather longer than it ought to have done for me to realize that I was once again making like a Roman instead of learning how to live my own life. I did develop a taste for prints, shared with Kathleen. But eventually I woke up to the fact that I am uncomfortable living with antiques.
I was recalling an old argument with my mother the other day, talking to someone in the editorial department at Antiques Magazine. My mother insisted that anything called an “antique” had to have been made prior to 1833. I argued that it had to be a hundred years old, that the applicable Federal law, passed in 1933, fixed a term, not a date. How I knew about this law, or what business the federal government had ruling on antiques in the first place, I have no idea whatsoever, but the woman from Antiques nodded her head vigorously: I was right about the century, twice the period that has elapsed since my arguing the matter with my mother.
We have a small chair that I have always assumed to an antique; with every passing year, I can be more assured of it. I call it the “French chair,” as it was probably called that when it was new. Carved fruits, refined nor crude, arch over an open, unupholstered back (against which, Trollope reminds us, no true lady’s back would ever lean), and the legs are just finished just enough not to be dismissed as rustic. The chair belonged to my maternal grandmother and might well have been the finest piece of furniture in someone’s house at one time, out in the Midwest somewhere. I wouldn’t dream of sitting on it, but Kathleen takes it at dinner parties. It would be curious, if not frankly out of place, at our friend’s new apartment.