SC - Roast Beef

[Decker, Terry D.]

Roast Beef

The best bastings for meats.  Then to know the best bastings for meat, which
is sweet butter, sweet oil, barrelled butter, or fine rendered up seam, with
cinnamon, cloves and mace.  There be some that will baste only with water,
and salt, and with nothing else; yet it is but opinion, and that must be the
world's master always. 
To know when meat is enough.  Lastly to know when meat is roasted enough;
for as too much rareness is unwholesome, so too much dryness is not
nourishing. Therefore to know when it is the perfect height, and is neither
too moist nor too dry, you shall observe these signs first in your large
joints of meat; when the steam or smoke of the meat ascendeth, either
upright or else goeth from the fire, when it beginneth a little to shrink
from the spit, or when the gravy which drppeth from it is clear without
bloodiness, then is the meat enough . . .
				Gervase Markham
				The English Hous-wife, 1615

Take a beef roast.
Baste with melted butter.  Sprinkle with salt, pepper and crushed rosemary.
My opinion for the baste.
Place in a roasting pan fat-side up.  Roast 30-35 minutes per pound at 325
degree F.   Baste every half hour with melted butter.