Beef Rouladen with Mashed Potatoes

Anna got tenure. The Minneapolis school district notified her on Tuesday afternoon, in a way that Anna described as anticlimactic — an email, sent from a generic district address, with the subject line "Tenure Decision." She thought it was spam at first. She almost deleted it. Then she opened it, and her name was in the body, and she sat at her kitchen table in her apartment in St. Paul and read it three times before she believed it, and then she called me.

I was in the middle of charting at the nurses' station at St. Mary's when my phone buzzed. I almost didn't answer — I have a rule about phones on the unit — but I saw it was Anna and I stepped into the supply closet and picked up. She said "Mom, I got it," and I said "You got what," because I am sometimes slow on the uptake, and she said "Tenure, Mom. I got tenure." And I leaned against the shelf of saline bags and I cried for thirty seconds in a supply closet at four-fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon, and then I composed myself and walked back to my charting and finished my shift and didn't tell anyone, because the news belonged to Anna and she would tell people in her own time and her own way.

Paul knew before I got home. Anna had called him too, of course — Paul is the teacher, he understands what tenure means in a way I, as a nurse, only approximately do. He was making coffee when I walked in. He looked at me and grinned the slow, crooked grin that I fell in love with at the church potluck in 1986, and he said "Our girl." And I said "Our girl." And Sven, who can tell when something has shifted in the room, came over and put his head on my knee, and I sat at the kitchen table for ten minutes with Paul and the dog and didn't take my coat off because the moment was too good to interrupt with practicality.

Anna is twenty-six. She teaches fifth grade at a public elementary school in a neighborhood of Minneapolis that doesn't make it into the brochures. Her students come to school hungry sometimes. She keeps granola bars in her desk and a coat closet stocked with the donations she organizes herself. She doesn't talk about that part of her job much. When she does, she's matter-of-fact: "That's the job. That's why they pay me." But Paul and I know what she's doing. Paul, especially, who has been teaching high school history for thirty-one years in a different but adjacent kind of school, knows exactly what Anna is doing. He says she's a better teacher at twenty-six than he was at forty.

So Sunday I made beef rouladen. Not just any Sunday dinner — the meal Mamma used to make on the rare occasions when something genuinely worth celebrating happened in our house. Köttbullar were Tuesday. Limpa bread was Saturday. But beef rouladen — those thin slices of beef rolled around mustard and bacon and pickles and onions, braised slowly in red wine until the meat falls apart — that was the meal that meant someone we loved had done something worth celebrating. Mamma made it when Erik passed his journeyman's exam at the mill. She made it when Pappa got the promotion that didn't change his pay much but did change the title on his door. She made it when I got my acceptance to nursing school, and she made it again four years later when I graduated, and both times she cried at the table and pretended she wasn't.

The recipe is German more than Swedish, technically — rouladen are a German classic. But food doesn't respect national borders the way passports do, and Mamma learned the dish from her neighbor in Uppsala, who learned it from a German woman who had married a Swede after the war, and by the time the recipe reached our house in Duluth it had Scandinavian salt and a Lake Superior winter wrapped around it. Mamma served it with kokt potatis (boiled potatoes mashed with butter and cream) and rödkål (red cabbage braised with apples and vinegar), and the table smelled like all of Europe at once, and we ate slowly because eating fast would have insulted the meal.

I made it Sunday afternoon. The technique takes time but the time is the point. You pound the beef thin between sheets of plastic wrap until it's almost translucent — eighth-inch slabs, four ounces each, six slices total because Paul and I eat two each on a celebration Sunday. You lay them out on the cutting board and spread each one with German mustard (the brown kind, not the yellow), and then you lay a strip of bacon across, and a strip of dill pickle, and a thin row of finely diced onion, and you roll them up tight and secure them with kitchen string or with toothpicks if you can't find the string. (I can never find the string.) You sear them hard in butter and oil in a heavy Dutch oven until they're mahogany on every side, and then you deglaze the pan with red wine — a full cup, the cheap kind, because the cheap kind is what Mamma used and the cheap kind is what works — and you scrape up every brown bit from the bottom because that's where the flavor is.

Then comes the long part. You add beef stock to cover, a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, salt, pepper, and you slide the Dutch oven into the oven at three hundred twenty-five degrees and you walk away for two hours. The kitchen fills with the smell that I associate with my mother more than any other smell in the world — the slow-cooking-beef, the wine, the bay, the bacon rendering inside the rolls. Sven sat by the oven the whole time. Paul came in and out of the kitchen and asked when it would be ready and I told him every fifteen minutes and he asked anyway, because asking is part of the ritual and the ritual is part of the meal.

The rouladen come out fork-tender, and the braising liquid reduces into a deep brown sauce that you thicken slightly with a beurre manié (equal parts butter and flour, kneaded together, whisked in at the end) until it coats the back of a spoon. You serve the rolls sliced or whole, with the sauce poured over, alongside the mashed potatoes and the red cabbage and a glass of the same wine you cooked with. The first bite makes you stop talking for a minute. The second bite makes you go back to your mother in your head and thank her, again, for teaching you this dish on a Sunday afternoon when you were sixteen years old and didn't know yet what you were learning.

Anna called again Sunday evening. We had her on speakerphone at the table — Anna in St. Paul, Peter on the line from Madison where he's finishing his engineering degree, Elsa from her dorm at the University of Minnesota where she's a junior. Paul and I told them about the rouladen. Anna laughed and said Mamma would approve. Peter said save him some. Elsa said she wanted the recipe. I am sending the recipe to all three of them this week. The kitchen is full of people, even when they're three hundred miles away.

German rouladen, Swedish family, Minnesota table. Two hours in the oven. Here's the build.

Prep Time: 30 min | Cook Time: 2 hr | Total Time: 2 hr 30 min | Servings: 6

Ingredients

6 slices top round beef, pounded to 1/8 inch thick (about 4 oz each)
3 tablespoons whole-grain German mustard
6 strips thick-cut bacon
3 large dill pickles, cut lengthwise into thin spears (12 spears total)
1 medium yellow onion, finely diced
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup dry red wine
2 cups beef stock
1 bay leaf
2 sprigs fresh thyme
1 tablespoon flour + 1 tablespoon softened butter (for beurre manié)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
For the mashed potatoes:
2 lbs Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and quartered
1/2 cup heavy cream, warmed
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
Kosher salt to taste

Instructions

Prep the beef. Lay each slice of pounded beef on a cutting board. Season both sides with salt and pepper.
Build the rolls. Spread each slice with about 1/2 tablespoon of mustard. Lay a strip of bacon across, then 2 pickle spears side by side, then a small line of diced onion. Roll up tightly from the short end and secure with kitchen string or two toothpicks.
Sear. Heat the butter and oil in a heavy Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Sear the rolls on all sides until deeply browned, about 8–10 minutes total. Transfer to a plate.
Deglaze. Pour the red wine into the hot Dutch oven and scrape up all the browned bits from the bottom. Simmer for 2 minutes to cook off the alcohol.
Braise. Return the rolls to the pot, add beef stock to nearly cover, then tuck in the bay leaf and thyme. Cover and transfer to a 325°F oven for 2 hours, until the meat is fork-tender.
Make the potatoes. While the rouladen braise, boil the potatoes in well-salted water until very tender, about 18 minutes. Drain and return to the hot pot for a minute to dry. Mash with the warm cream and 4 tablespoons of butter. Season generously with salt.
Finish the sauce. Transfer the rouladen to a platter and tent with foil. Strain the braising liquid into a saucepan and bring to a simmer. Knead together the tablespoon of flour and tablespoon of softened butter to make a beurre manié, then whisk it into the sauce a piece at a time until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 3 minutes.
Serve. Remove the strings or toothpicks from the rolls. Plate with mashed potatoes, spoon the sauce over the rouladen, and serve immediately with red cabbage on the side if you have it.

Nutrition (per serving)

Beef Rouladen with Mashed Potatoes — The Meal That Means Someone We Love Did Something Worth Celebrating