Beef stews courtesy of Robert Carrier

"something you feed the family, not your guests" Darina Allen

This blog is a combination of a lucky dip and what I have decided to cook for dinner tonight.

The lucky dip was once again The Robert Carrier Cookbook. (I must have an unconscious preference for this book - and it certainly is one of my favourites - the fact that it is falling apart is evidence.) And the page I opened it at included three beef stews in his section on beef stews. There were variations on Boeuf Bourguignonne and Daube de Boeuf and also a Hochepot de Queue de Boeuf (oxtail). So all French, not that the entire section on beef stews is all French - just this particular page. Now I won't be making any of these particular recipes - I shall just be making something up with what I have to hand, but seeing those mashed potatoes in the picture above makes me realise how much I like mashed potatoes - particularly with stews. And indeed I will add mashed potatoes to my list of potential subjects for future blogs. Or maybe it should include dumplings - Delia had a couple of recipes with dumplings. And I don't think I shall use this blog to just talk about French beef stews - beef stews are so universal after all aren't they? Except where there is a religious taboo or the people are just too poor to be able to afford meat like beef. And maybe - as a postscript to some of my previous posts, in the future we won't be eating beef at all because it uses up too many of the earth's resources in its production.

I am also not going to talk about any particular kind of stew - like a daube for example - they deserve posts all to themselves.

Thinking back to my childhood I don't think we had a lot of beef stews - though we did have oxtail stews. We were poor and so we had meals made with the cheaper cuts - as the month progressed before the next pay day the cuts became cheaper and cheaper - and oxtail was one of these. Nowadays oxtail is quite rare and quite expensive. There's not a lot of meat on oxtail, but what there is, when it has been stewed for some time is delicious. Ditto for all of those cheaper cuts. You just have to cook them for a long time. Delia Smith recommends shin over stewing steak because of the gelatinous bits that melt in the cooking and give the sauce a deliciously unctuous taste. This evening I shall be using rump steak which is a sort of compromise between the cheapest of cuts and the most expensive.

The stews of my youth did not use fancy liquids to give them flavour, not even beer - it was just water that they were cooked in. Jane Grigson is pretty scathing about this:

"The watery, stringy mixture served up in British institutions" Jane Grigson, The Mushroom Feast

But I don't remember my childhood stews as being watery or stringy. Definitely not stringy. Maybe a bit watery sometimes - rabbit stew had a lot of juice and was probably more like a soup than a stew, but I don't think this mattered, because the long slow cooking with various flavourings made it pretty tasty. And you need lots of juice if you are having dumplings. And I don't think my mother fried the meat first before stewing it. I think it was all put in the pot and cooked in the oven - sometimes on the cooktop - for those soupy stews. And Jamie Oliver states somewhere that he actually thinks this gives the stew a 'sweeter and cleaner' taste, and no longer browns the meat first when he makes a beef stew.

Stews are also basic peasant food are they not? Cheap cuts, cooked slowly in ovens with vegetables in season. Then at some point, was it in the 60s?, they became fashionable and standard bistro fare thanks to people like Elizabeth David and Robert Carrier. Today there is probably more of a trend towards fast food in the sense that it doesn't take long to cook - stir fries, barbecues, that sort of thing. But maybe there is a gradual drift back to the stew - and what else is curry but a stew? And cooks like Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith have certainly done their bit to encourage their consumption.

We haven't had a beef stew for some time. I won't be marinading the meat - as Robert Carrier recommends in several of his recipes - we don't do that as often these days either do we? At least not for a long time - short marinades maybe for barbecue and grilled food, but not long marinades for roasts and stews. I used to do that a lot when I was young, but it needs a bit of forward planning and I don't do enough of that these days. It's all generally a bit last minute. Like today's stew. I really should start thinking about starting it soon - it's early afternoon - rather than leaving it until late afternoon which is when I usually start cooking. Then it would be a braise, or a sauté rather than a stew. My flavourings will probably be Mediterranean - red wine, tomatoes, basil, olives and eggplant - but that's because of what I have in the fridge, not because of a preference. And yes I think I will do myself some mashed potatoes - maybe with basil and cheese. I hope it will look something like this - which is another of Robert Carrier's recipes cooked up by a fan.

And I'll leave the last word to Delia (part owner of Norwich City football club and a football fanatic - soccer that is.) I thought it was rather nice.

"One of the joys of my life is going to a football match on a Saturday afternoon in the chill of midwinter, having organised things in such a way that, when I return home, I am welcomed by the evocative aroma of something wonderful and warming simmering gently in the oven. If that something is shin or leg of beef and it's given a long, slow cooking with chunky vegetables, herbs and ale then what will happen during that long sojourn in the oven is that those very unattractive gelatinous bits present in the meat will gradually dissolve and, as that happens, release a high proportion of concentrated beefiness to enrich the sauce. Then, on your return, if you pop in a few mustard and chive dumplings and bake them until they become crisp and golden on top, this will give you a meal for four that will be aptly fit to celebrate a victory or sublimely comforting to soothe you in your loss." Delia Smith

Like champagne only cheaper.