Barbecued beef short ribs in your clay cooking bowl

The barbecue sauce recipe has been adapted from our old kitchen Bible, Marion Cunningham's 1986 revision of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. The clay cooking bowl, darkened with use,

is a Pampered Chef product, albeit probably long since discontinued. The short ribs are best if they are bone-in. Serve it all forth with garlic-laced mashed potatoes and a vegetable or two of your choice. The accompanying wine should be as big and fruity as you like -- a nice Chilean carmenère would do very well. 

Barbecued beef short ribs in a clay cooking bowl

Preheat the oven to 350 F. In the bottom of your clay bowl, mix

1 and 1/4 cups tomato juice
2 Tbsp. soy sauce
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup vinegar
1 tsp. dry mustard
1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 small onion, peeled and halved

Put in about 2 to 3 pounds bone-in beef short ribs, or about 8 to 10 ribs. The bowl will be crowded, so turn the meat over in the sauce or brush the sauce on with a pastry brush so that all the ribs are soaked as well as possible. Bury the onion in the sauce, and cover the bowl with a sheet of tin foil. Place the ribs in the oven and bake for one hour; then reduce the heat to 225 F and continue baking for four more hours.

By dinnertime the meat will fall off the bone, and will have rendered all its fat. This makes the bubbling sauce very greasy, of course, so if you want to serve it in all its deliciousness, you can use a bulb baster to vacuum up the good juices from underneath the layer of fat. Squirt them into a gravy boat for presentation and you are ready to eat.