My family has always served roasts with the cap meat still on top of the roast. That part gets well done to serve those wretched few who dislike rare meat, but we've noticed butchers now commonly remove that part and inflate the price of what's left. Her Highness Julia Child may not consider the cap worthy of roasting, but we do. Make 3 deep slits in top of your roast, and slip a clove of garlic down into each. Roast in a preheated 325° oven, 25 minutes per pound for roasts without a cap, 20 minutes per pound if your lucky enough to find a butcher that hasn't trimmed off the cap, to yield a very rare roast. An hour before its time is done, surround with, say, 6 peeled potatoes, 4 onions and 2 carrots. Let the roast set out 15 to 20 minutes before cutting, so figure an hour before serving (especially if making Yorkshire pudding). Serve with horseradish sauce

Because beef is considerably less fatty than it had been 20 years ago, there's a lot less wiggle-room in cooking roasts. Russ Parsons of the Los Angeles Times did an experiment with three different roasting methods: roast one at 450°, one at 300° and one started at 450° for fifteen minutes then turned down and roasted at 300°. Each was cooked to an internal temperature of 125° then let to rest for ten minutes where the internal temperature rose to 135° Each cooked to the rare side of medium rare, where the muscle fibers were pink and set, not raw. He found the roast cooked at 450° had a quite rare interior and nice crust but the meat was definitely chewy. The roast cooked at consistent low heat had a smaller crust, but the interior was tender, moist, and had a meaty flavour. The roasts cooked at high temperature and then turned down had crusts not quite as good as the high-temp roasts, and the interiors were not as moist as the low-temp roasts. See his article for full details and the modern socio-political history of the different methods.

We've begun experimenting with Parson's technique but frankly don't find it much different from our family tradition. More comparison needs to be made with internal temperatures when roasts are removed from the oven.