Beer Braised Pot Roast with Mushrooms

When I first met Bruce, he wouldn't touch beef chuck. He thought it was too cheeky, too fatty, too much of everything. A great chef or not, he might have cooked it--but he wouldn't eat it. He was too busy being a waif-thin New Yorker.

Leave it to a good Southern boy to change his mind.

Nothing spells dinner like pot roast. It's what we had after church on Sundays, for holidays meals, for no reason at all.

Except ours was a tad gummy. We often had it out of the pressure cooker. And so we lost the most important parts: the browning and the long braising--which infuses every bit of that melting fat and collagen with flavor.

So here's a meal that can change a New Yorker's mind, that can keep him at the table: that chuck roast, cooked in a streamlined version of the famous Belgian stew, carbonnade flamande.

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Pot Roast With Root Vegetables

Who knew foods could be so culturally, even ethnically, charged? When I was growing up, we called beef chuck roast pot roast. It was shoved in the oven with potatoes and carrots while we were at church. Bruce, on the other hand, called beef brisket pot roast. It was long-stewed for a holiday meal with tomatoes and onions. As a Texan, I didn't even know you could stew a brisket. I assumed it came off the cow already smoked.

Thus, Bruce and I endured years of rank confusion, a constant back-and-forth of inter-faith insanity. Like this:

"Do you want pot roast for dinner?"

"What kind of pot roast?"

"Brisket."

"Oh."

"Why?"

"Because when you said pot roast, I though you meant. . . ."

We finally brought peace to the home by naming that stewed brisket Jewish pot roast. So much is solved by adjectives. 

So in that spirit, I suppose we should call this recipe Christian pot roast.

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