Why buy the cow when you can’t cook a roast?

Since I’m trying to eat more locally grown and raised food these days, I got excited about an offer to buy local grass-fed beef. Specifically, an eighth of a cow. Forty pounds of ground beef, steaks and a variety of roasts, which thankfully fit in my freezer.

Now you might think that a girl who hails from Iowa and has farmers in her family would know her cuts of meat. You’d be wrong. Oh, I know my NY strip from my flank steak, but after that I’m clueless. So when, one wintry day last week, I longed for the smell of pot roast simmering in the crock pot, I was a bit dismayed that none of the butcher-wrapped packages was marked as “pot roast.” Hmmm. I found sirloin, chuck roast, round roast, rolled rump roast, brisket and cross-cut shank. But no pot roast.

I didn’t panic, though. I pulled out the Better Homes & Garden New Cook Book that my mother gave me when I married and looked up the recipe for pot roast. It called for chuck roast. I had that! Problem solved, lesson learned, dinner served. Delicious.

So today I decide to cook the rolled rump roast. (Actually, I wanted to cook it over the weekend but the damn thing took two days to thaw.) Unsure if this is a slow-cooker cut of meat or a roast-in-the-oven cut, I flip to the index of the cookbook for some guidance. But there are no entries for rump roast.

So I go to the chapter on meat, thinking I’ll find it listed in the handy-dandy “cuts of meat” guide. There are 28 cuts of meat listed and shown, number-coded to a diagram of a side of beef. None of them are called rump roast. None of the pictures even look like my roast.

Okay, I think, “rump” is obviously on the back end of the cow. I’ll find the back end on the diagram and see what it’s called. Only the diagram doesn’t have a head or a tail (or legs), so it’s kind of hard to determine which end is the rump. One end is called “chuck” and the other is labeled “round.” Round sounds more like rump but chuck is actually bigger and rounder than round is. Oh for God’s sake.

I just want to cook a meal! A simple roast that any housewife in the 1950s knew how to cook but I can’t seem to figure out. I am a hopeless homemaker. By this time it’s going on 3:00 — what if a rolled rump roast has to cook all day? If I lived in the 1950s, my family would starve.

But wait! The 21st century Julie has a reference tool 1950s Julie would not: the internet. I Google “rolled rump roast” and voila! Cooks.com has this very straightforward recipe. In fact, it’s roasting in the oven as I type this.

I’m still fuzzy on which part of the cow my roast is from, but at least I know other people have cooked it. Whether or not it turns out tasty, I’ll have to let you know.