When I was an eight-year-old kid, they were the two most unfunny jokes in the world.
It would be 3:30 in the afternoon, two hours before dinner. I would go up to my mother, tug at her jeans, and look up to her with the sweetest little puppy dog face and say, “Moooommmmm, I’m huuuunnnngry.”
“Hi hungry, I’m mom, nice to meet you!” she’d reply.
Frustrated, I’d give a little whine, and press on, “Can you make me a sandwich?”
She’d drop what she was doing, turn to me, and pull her hands in close to her chest, wait two seconds, and extend them both out like she was performing a magic trick.
“Boomph!… You’re a sandwich!”
Defeated, I’d just groan back to the frontroom, and realize, like always, I’d just have to wait until dinner time.
My mother’s brilliance was lost on me then. I laugh today, but back then it was just cruel. It would have been cause for tantrum, if she wasn’t such a fantastic cook.
Her pot roast was always my favorite.
There was just something about its simplicity, its uniqueness, its greasy-mushroom flavored goodness.
I’d put my ma’s pot roast, up against anyone else’s ma’s pot roast in the country.
I gave her a call last night, asking her how to make it. She’d given me a cookbook with most of her recipes when she and my dad visited two weeks ago, but her pot roast was missing from the collection.
Ma’s cook book
Featuring her two most famous lines
“Hey, ma, how long do you simmer the pot roast?” I asked.
“Oh for about an hour and a half. It came out good, your father and I are just sitting down to it now,” she replied.
I was confused.
“Wait, you guys are eating pot roast?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re eating right now,” she said.
Weirdly enough, the night I was to first embark on one of her classic dishes, she’d made the same thing for she and my father to eat that same night. Since it’s just she and my dad living at home now, I wondered if she scaled down her measurements, or still made enough for eight?
I think that was one of the toughest parts of my mother’s job cooking for a family of eight. Picking dishes that made everyone happy, and then making sure there was plenty to go around. Not only that, but having it timed up every night for 5:30pm, minutes after my father would come home, it was a magical feat of bulk, efficiency, and satisfaction.
Food and family go together like peas and carrots, peanut butter and jelly, spaghetti and meatballs.
My family has a long history with its favorite dishes; whether it’s the Polish sausage we ground, season, case, and cook as a family, the mouth-watering deserts like pineapple upside-down and gooey-butter cakes, or Grandpa’s fruit salad (which was nothing more a mixture of canned and fresh fruit, but remarkable because he always took the time to slice every single grape in half).
I myself was seen as a prodigy of consumption. Destined to suck up more crumbs than any 8 lb.-Oreck in history.
It began in 1991. As family legend has it, we went to McDonald’s for an afternoon meal. My Grandma, for a reason that is to this day still unknown, decided to order 1-year old Jakey a Big Mac. As the story goes, I ate the entire thing, and still had room left for a few more McNuggets.
But I that would be the pinnacle of my eating career (yes, even more impressive than my 3rd place finish at the 2012 South Side Polish Festival Pierogi-Eating Contest). Throughout the years I would be known by an ironic nickname, głodny (the Polish word for hungry).
I was constantly hungry. I was always looking for something to eat. And maybe it was bad judgement, or maybe it was my quest to become the next Takeru Kobayashi, but I always wound up putting too much on my plate, and not being able to finish.
“Jacob, your eyes are always bigger than your stomach!” my mother would say.
Most times I couldn’t help it. The meal was so good, I just never wanted to stop eating!
But that was never the case for my ma’s pot roast. It was the only meal in which I would literally lick my plate clean.
So I tried befuddlingly last night to make my ma’s famous pot roast meal. It didn’t go exactly how she makes it. I overcooked the roast and it came out dry. I cut the carrots too big. The gravy came out a little soupy.
Took a crack at making Ma’s pot roast
It just wasn’t the same.
Ma’s made that pot roast probably two hundred times over the last thirty years. She’s perfected the craft to the point where the process is almost irreplicable. She gave me the recipe over the phone, and honestly, it didn’t taste anything like how I remember it.
Nobody makes it like ma does. That’s why her pot roast is my favorite… and her golumpki… and her stuffed pork chops… and her chicken-broccoli-rice casserole… and pretty much everything she makes.
I think it’s because I’m missing that one ingredient that makes everything taste like it’s the best in the world: a mother’s love.
Plate licked clean
Jake Berent 
Well Jake…..what a pot roast of a story….How your moms pot roast made you feel is the same way your mom made me feel as a young girl coming back to the U.S. after living in Ireland and losing my parents…,Your mom is the first and the most precious friend I made. She looked after me. She made sure nobody ever hurt me…she protected me….I have never had moms pot roast, but I have had her love and still have it 38 years later, so in my book, its right up there with pot roast, doesn’t matter if the meat is tough, the carrots are to big or the gravy is not right, it is all made with love, and this is my version of your moms pot roast…..and all of you are my little carrots and other veges…..whom I love
She’s one heck of a lady. Her selflessness lives has spread to all of us. You know I’ve never asked her about that chapter of her life, I’m kind of curious now.