Beef, Chicken, Pork, or Deer Meat Makes Good Mississippi Roast

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If you are an on-line kind of person, with your phone in hand, or tablet open nearby; if you check Pinterest daily (or hourly); if you watch Good Morning America every day, then this recipe will be—or ought to be—familiar. Mississippi Roast is apparently what they call “trending.” That is, it is cropping up a whole lot on social media (for the uninitiated, which I suspect includes a fair number of you dear readers,) any on-line sites where people make and send electronic messages, tag favorite things of all sort, indicate approval by “liking” and forwarding comments from anyone.) Evidently, the recipe has been “pinned” a million times since 2014 on Pinterest. It is as if the recipe were clipped one million times from newspapers and magazines, passed from person to person on little scraps of paper, and stuck on some giant, world-sized bulletin board.

I saw it in the New York Times, and for some odd reason it caught my attention, possibly because anything I can cook slowly on the wood-burning kitchen stove at the same it keeps my house warm, really appeals to me. The original recipe, contributed by Robin Chapman of Ripley, Mississippi to a community cookbook, and subsequently picked up by a blogger, calls for using your slow-cooker, so this is a great recipe for cooks who work outside the home but want a hot dinner without a last-minute scramble.

The first time I made this recipe, I used beef, and we loved it. Then I tried it with a whole chicken and it was wonderful. Next, I will try this with a piece of venison I have and it occurs to me that this combination with a fresh pork shoulder would produce a terrific variation on pulled pork. In fact, this is a kind of pulled beef recipe that can be served on a bun if you want, or a little pile of noodles, or alongside potatoes.

The secret ingredient is pepperoncini, found in the pickle aisle of the grocery store. This is about as hot a pepper as I can stand and, without being painful, lends a lovely warmth and zip to the beef.

The recipe also called for a couple of packages of premixed stuff including Ranch Dressing seasonings added to a chuck roast. I can’t bring myself to buy ingredients that I already have on hand that someone else has measured and put into pretty packaging along with some other, possibly questionable, substances. The Times handily converted the packaged stuff into recognizable ingredients like mayonnaise, vinegar, buttermilk, dill, flour.

Looking for… a breakfast cake with rhubarb that is like gingerbread. Stephen Bergey of Belfast wrote that the recipe was one of Brownie Schrumpf’s. He wrote, “Rhubarb was the moist agent in the cake. I can’t find my copy. We called it breakfast-cake cake and it was published in ’82-’85? It’s a great unsweet cake and I would like to find it again.” Maybe one of you inveterate recipe clippers out there might have this recipe and would be willing to share.

Mississippi Roast
Serves: 6
 
Ingredients
  • 1 three to four pound boneless chuck roast
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Flour
  • Vegetable oil
  • 6 tablespoons butter
  • 8-12 pepperoncini
  • 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
  • 2 teaspoons cider vinegar
  • 1 teaspoon dried dill
  • ¼ teaspoon paprika
  • 1 tablespoon buttermilk
Instructions
  1. Sprinkle the roast lightly with salt, pepper. and flour on all sides, and rub it in.
  2. Put the vegetable oil in a heavy pan and bring to a high temperature.
  3. Sear the meat on all sides, enough to create a little crustiness, then put it into a slow cooker or Dutch oven with the butter and pepperoncini. Cover.
  4. Whisk together the mayonnaise, vinegar, dill, paprika and buttermilk until it is smooth, and add to the pot. If you use a slow cooker, set it at low; if you use a Dutch oven, keep the burner set at low.
  5. Cook for six to eight hours, or until you can shred it easily with a fork.
  6. Shred it and serve it with the pot gravy and pepperoncini on top.

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.