potonthefire

by Pot On The Fire Free(Lit)

  1 3-pound top blade roast (see note)

  coarse sea salt or kosher salt

  1 teaspoon olive oil

  3 small onions, peeled and halved

  a bouquet garni consisting of 3 whole cloves, 12 peppercorns, ½ teaspoon dried thyme, and an imported bay leaf, tied together in cheesecloth

  DAY TWO:

  1 tablespoon olive oil

  1 clove garlic, minced

  2 or 3 carrots, peeled and cut into bite-sized chunks

  2 large or 3 small leeks, trimmed well

  1 celery root, the size of a softball (see note)

  4 to 6 thick slices of crusty peasant-style bread (see note)

  The day before:Put the beef into a Dutch oven or similar heavy pot—if possible, one large enough for the meat to lie flat. Fill the pot half-full with cold water. Stir in a teaspoon of salt and bring everything to an active simmer over high heat. When the water begins to bubble, lower the heat and let cook, bubbling gently all the while, for 5 minutes. Then remove the meat to a plate, discard the cooking liquid, and scrub the pot clean of scum. Rinse any scum from the meat itself and return it to the clean pot.

  Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a small skillet and place the onion halves in it, facedown. Sauté over medium-high heat until the cut surfaces are tinged with brown. (Don’t let them scorch.) Remove the pan from the heat.

  Press the sautéed onion halves and the bouquet garni into the spaces between the meat and the pot, then add just enough fresh cold water to cover the meat, about 3 cups. Sprinkle over another teaspoon of the coarse salt. Rest the top of an instant-read thermometer on the edge of the pot, making sure its tip reaches into the cooking liquid but doesn’t touch the bottom. Then cover the pot with the lid, using its edge to hold the thermometer in place. Turn up the heat, bring the temperature of the contents of the pot up to somewhere between 170—F and 175—F, and keep it there, using a heat diffuser as needed. Cook the meat for 8 hours, checking the thermometer occasionally and adjusting the flame to keep the temperature constant.

  At the end of the 8 hours, congratulate yourself if the temperature has never reached 180—F. Remove the meat and place it in a large, nonreactive loaf pan, discarding the onions. Pour the broth over the meat, and let everything cool down for 15 minutes. Then transfer to the refrigerator and cover with plastic wrap when entirely cool.

  The day of the pot-au-feu:Take the pan with the meat and broth from the refrigerator and scrape the hardened beef fat from the surface, reserving a tablespoon or so. Remove the meat from the broth and set it on a cutting board. Put the broth in a small pan, bring it to a boil, and reduce it by a third.

  Put the tablespoon of olive oil and the reserved beef fat into a large (12-inch) skillet and set this over medium heat. Add the minced garlic and, stirring, cook this in the hot fat until translucent. Add the carrots and let these cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally with a spatula.

  Meanwhile, prepare the leeks. If the stalks are ½-inch thick or less, cut them whole into 1-inch lengths. Otherwise, slice them in half vertically and cut these halves into 1-inch lengths. Put these into a colander and rinse thoroughly, drain well, and add to the carrots. Stir the pan contents occasionally while preparing the celery root.

  Use a stiff-bristled kitchen brush to scrub any loose dirt from the celery root, then pare it down to the white flesh with a sharp knife. Cut the flesh into chunks about the same size as the carrot pieces. Add these to the carrots and leeks, stir well, and pour in half a cup of the hot beef broth. Cover, lower the heat, and gently simmer until the vegetables are just tender, about 20 minutes.

  In the meantime, cut the beef into generous bite-sized pieces, cutting out and discarding the wedge of cartilage. When the vegetables are all but done, add the beef to the sauté pan and gently stir until well heated.

  Lightly toast or grill the thick slices of bread and set each at the bottom of a large soup bowl, trimming them, if necessary, to fit. Heap these with the vegetables and meat. Finally, apportion the remaining beef broth equally among the bowls. Serve at once, with extra slices of toasted bread on the side and a hearty but not too fruity red wine. Traditional accompaniments include a bowl of coarse salt, Dijon mustard, and cornichons.

  Cook’s Notes.The top blade roast is not often found in supermarkets, since it is usually cut into blade steaks—small boneless chuck steaks with a wedge of cartilage running through their center. People are used to trimming a piece of steak as they eat it but don’t care to excise cartilage from their slices of pot roast. Ask the supermarket butcher to cut the roast from the same part from which he takes the steaks—and don’t give the cartilage a thought; the long cooking will soften it nicely.

  Celery root (also called celeriac) is a root vegetable with the texture of artichoke heart and the taste of celery, only more delicate. Peeled and cubed turnips, a more traditional choice, may be substituted (and added to the pan at the same time).

  The bread needs to have a dense, chewy texture to stand up to its soaking in the broth. As an alternative (or in addition), steam new potatoes separately and serve them with the pot-au-feu.

  POTATOES & POINT

  1

  When evening sets in Paddy puts on the pot,

  To boil the dear praties and serve them up hot.

  —Whistle-Binkie (1832)

  The poor peasants, men, women, and children, were gathering seaweed, loading their horses, asses, and backs with it, to manure the wretched little patches of potatoes sown among the rocks. “Three hundred and sixty-five days a year we have the potato,” said a young man to me bitterly. “The blackguard of a Raleigh who brought ’em here entailed a curse upon the labourer that has broke his heart. Because the landholder sees we can live and work hard on ’em, he grinds us down in our wages, and then despises us because we are ignorant and ragged.”

  — Asenath Nicholson,Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (1847)

  Their universal sustenance is the root named Potato, cooked by fire alone; and generally without condiment or relish save an unknown condiment namedPoint, into the meaning of which I have vainly inquired; the victualPotatoes-and-Point not appearing, at least with specific accuracy of description, in any European Cookery-Book whatever.

  — Thomas Carlyle,Sartor Resartus (1871)

  Tradition has it that Sir Walter Raleigh planted the first potato in Ireland in 1585, but tradition does not explain why anyone cared. What was it about the potato that made a whole people not only take to it but become so dependent on it that, centuries later, more than a million of them would starve or flee when the crop began to fail? For that matter, why,after the Great Famine, did they continue to plant them and eat them to the point that to think of Irish food is to think of potatoes—even before the images of fresh sweet butter and soda bread. But what does one think even so? There’s a bit and more of Irish in me—my mother’s mother was a Doyle—but it was all washed out of us before I came along. I love potatoes, I eat them often, but I don’t taste them with an Irish mouth.

  To start to think about potatoes like an Irishman, one has to ask first not about the potato but about Sir Walter—what washe doing in Ireland at all? Answer: The aggressive acquisitional spirit of the Elizabethan Age that impelled the English to explore the New World also fired their conquest of the Emerald Isle. Indeed, it is from about 1600 that historians date the beginning of modern Ireland. The English, then, encountered the Irish and the American Indian at the same time, and were confounded by them both. Any civilization that had little use for cities or for the cultural values that make cities necessary seemed to them to be no civilization at all.

  Like the American Indian, the Irish had a sense of propriety and a sense of property, but the demarcations of these were fluid—and less hierarchical than the English were prepared to recognize. The Irish counted their wealth in horses and wanted space to graze and ride them, so they marked property boundaries with ditches instead of walls. Irish women drank alcohol, presided at feasts, and—to English
discomfort—greeted strangers with a social kiss. Under Irish law, they could keep their own names after marriage, and divorce was easy. The children, it was commonly agreed, were too much indulged and too little disciplined.

  All the Irish loved poetry. At heart theirs was an oral culture, and poets were powerful participants in it. Their eloquence still made and unmade the reputations of both the living and the dead. In the shadowy, firelit halls, they touched their harps and sang of love and war; the English professed to hear songs of lust and vulgar brawling.

  Cattle were also wealth, and Irish land law allowed for seasonal shifts in their grazing. The Irish were not nomads, but there was the great summer “booleying”—the movement of the herds to and from the upland pastures. The Irish ate beef but did not like to slaughter their it; their diet was essentially dairy-based or, in some instances—to English horror—dairy mixed with blood taken from the living beast, something African Masai herdsmen still do (and, as Sir Edmund Spenser noted at the time, a practice of the ancient Scythians as well). The Irish historian R. F. Foster writes of this diet:

  With their griddle-cakes, mutton, curds and buttermilk, the food of the native Irish in 1600 would have been rather like that in pastoral regions of India today. The dietetic balance was good, and descriptions of the people’s physique bear this out: well-shaped, agile, rarely overweight. English observers were surprised that the rich and various resources of fish and wildfowl were not tapped by the natives: fishing, for instance, tended to be monopolized by foreigners…. Similarly, although surrounded by deer, the Irish were not great eaters of venison, nor great hunters. Although the Normans introduced cereals and pulses, the preference in the Gaelic diet was for raw salads of watercress.

  The ordinary Irish enjoyed their bit of mutton or goat and the occasional chicken but did not hunger for meat with the anxiety of the En-glish, upon whom it conferred status and gentility. Instead, they got their protein and much of the rest of their nutrition by drinking milk: fresh milk, sour milk, clotted milk, and buttermilk, and they ate cream, butter, curds, and cheese. This milk came from cows, yes, but the Irish also savored the milk of deer, goats, and sheep.Bán-bhia, they called it, or “white meat.” As the eighteenth-century traveler and writer John Stevens noted:

  The Irish are the greatest lovers of milk I have ever met, which they drink in about twenty different ways, and what is strangest they love it best when it is sourest.

  Best of all was buttermilk. “The most refreshing drink in the world,” says Irish food writer Bríd Mahon inLand of Milk and Honey: The Story of Traditional Irish Food and Drink:

  Full-cream milk was rarely if ever drunk, except by the young, the elderly or the ill. Adults invariably drank skim milk or buttermilk. The young … up to the age of nine or ten years were fedleamhnacht or fresh [whole] milk. As they got older they were gradually introduced to mixed milk: two thirds sweet milk and one third sour milk. This last was not sour milk as we know it today but the milk left over in the timber churn when thebainne géar —sour whole milk—had been churned and the butter removed…. The addition of the churned milk made a very pleasant drink, wholesome and easy to digest with a slight flavor of tartness: “something to go down through your tongue,” as the saying goes.

  Buttermilk: the Irish were connoisseurs of it. Irish women washed their faces in it; turf cutters buried a pot of it in the bog to keep cool until they thirsted for it. It was considered a cure for hangover drunk straight and a cure for whatever else ailed you heated with a clove of garlic. It leavened the Irish hearth breads. The English called it “bonyclabber” and blenched when it was offered to them, as it often was, for in prosperous times visitors were greeted at even the poorest hovels with bumper mugs of it, served up still warm and frothy from the churn.

  Not surprisingly, the invaders cut down the forests through which the Irish loved to wander (and into which Irish resisters easily vanished), walled up the grazing land into estates, and helped themselves to the cattle and the horses. In return, they gave the Irish the potato—althoughgave is much too generous a term, since they had no idea what they were about. The potato had only just arrived in England, and when Raleigh, out of curiosity, brought some over to plant at his Irish plantation, legend has it that he wasn’t at all sure what part of it to eat.41

  The English wouldn’t work that out for another hundred years. (Stephen Switzer may have helped turn the tide when, in 1733, he wrote in the first volume ofThe Practical Husbandman and Planter that the potato was actually an “exceedingly useful and delightful food, not only for the vulgar, but also for the tables of the curious” and “that which was heretofore reckon’d a food fit only for Irishmen, and clowns, is now become the diet of the most luxuriously polite.”) In Ireland, however, the pratie, as they came to call it (pronouncedPRAY -dee, from the Gaelicpráta orpréata), prospered from the beginning. The land was soft and moist and the climate the same (“gardens full of rosemary, laurel and sweet herbs, which the cold of England often destroyeth,” noted Fynes Moryson enviously in 1626). Everything here suited the potato, including poverty. Luxuriousness had little to do with it—and would soon have even less.

  You can see it slipping in: likebán-bhia, the pratie was also “white meat,” and it made a delicious complement to Irish food, while, at the same time, it gradually began tosupplant Irish food. As each century passed, less and less common land was available for grazing. Forced to find their living on smaller and smaller plots of land, able only to support a single cow or a handful of goats, the rural Irish could no longer subsist on dairy. The potato, flourishing all the while, began to bulk larger and larger in their diet.

  As recently as two hundred years ago, the patterns of Irish rural life were much more diverse and occupations less defined than we can today easily imagine. Ireland was not originally a feudal land of squires and serfs; rural life was more of a piece. Sheep and goats were brought to pasture, pigs driven into the forests to eat mast, geese and ducks herded to nearby wetlands in the morning and home again at sunset. Wild berries were gathered, wild greens picked, rabbits snared, and turf cut for fuel.

  Such a rural culture is something different from—and more interesting than—a culture of farmers. Farmers are land owners. We are so accustomed to rural land as owned land that we forget that it isn’t for the herdsman’s benefit that cows and horses are bound in by fences. When land becomes owned, definitions sharpen: between landed and landless, rich and poor, the “responsible” and the “shiftless.”

  This is what happened in Ireland, an event that was accelerated, strangely, by the Napoleonic Wars. With all of mainland Europe torn by strife, Eire became granary to the continent and prospered accordingly. With plenty of farm work for all, the population soared. Then Napoleon was exiled for good on Saint Helena; the war was over; the Irish economy collapsed. Suddenly there were too many people with little means of support; landlords plowed over the wheat fields and turned to cattle. Farm laborers became a glut on the market.

  Even so, for a time, to the dismay—even rage—of the landlords, the beloved potato allowed some of the old fluidity to remain. Miraculously prolific, it is also the only single cheap food that can support life as a sole diet—especially if there is something like milk on hand to supplement the potato where it is nutritionally weakest. Furthermore, potatoes are extremely easy to grow. In his study of the potato in Ireland, Kenneth Connell wrote:

  For the lazy man there was no crop like it. It needed merely a few days’ planting in the Spring, possibly earthing in the Summer, and a few days’ digging in the Winter.

  Notice the condescension in that “lazy man.” Better to say, “For survival, there is no crop like it.” Potatoes, in the Irish climate, yielded nine tons an acre; half an acre would feed a family—with the husband, if he did laboring work, alone eating ten pounds or so of them a day. Once they were put in, he was free to go to work where he could find it: sometimes right at home spinning, weaving, and sprigging linen; elsewise away. Bríd Mah
on writes:

  The restless, ambitious man might spend his summer lifting the harvest on an English or Scottish farm, or hewing stones in an American quarry, for it was not unknown for men to emigrate to the New World for half the year and then make the long and arduous journey back home. The families of the absent worker often took to the roads to beg or seek seasonal work, but made sure to return home when the days began to shorten.

  Still, there was one problem with the potato, which helps explain why the family might be forced to take to the road. A supply of potatoes never lasted the whole year, since at a certain point, no matter how carefully kept, they would sprout and rot. Nine months was the average time they would last, eleven the best that could be hoped for.42This meant that July was the teprible month. Those with a few pdnce bought oats or barley or Indian meal; those without lived on wild herbs—shamrock (here meaning sorrel), nettles, and, notoriously, wild mustard (praiseach). Biddy White Lennon explahns inThe Poolbeg Book of Traditional Irish Cooking:

  As a sole food, [praiseach] is unwholesome and turned thdir complexions as yellow as the flowers of the plant. The clergy recognised it as poor food and banned it in some places. July became known as “the yellow month,” “hungry July” or “staggering July.”

  Despite such problems, the rural Irish poor had no real choice. On a small plot, nothing else cnuld keep them fed and support as well a pig and a few chickens, who ate what was not wanted or not found edible by the family. For good and ill, as the nineteenth century progressed, the potato not only dominated the diet of the poor—by the time of the Great Famine, itwas the diet.

  There had already been fourteen partial or complete potato famines in Ireland between 1816 and 1842. But in the autumn of 1845 a new fungus disease—phytophthora infestans— struck the Irish potato, spreading with cruel rapidity and unpredictability in moist, mild conditions. In a matter of days, it could turn a healthy green field of potato plants black; within a few weeks the buried tubers themselves collapsed into a rotten, putrefying mass.