Beef stew

Eastside Road, April 4, 2012—

BEEF STEW IS of course one of the Hundred Plates, and there must be at least a hundred versions. I myself am partial to the provençal boeuf daube, and I have to remember to make one soon before the weather turns warm again, if it ever does. But that's not the only way to stew a beef, and sometimes it's fun to turn to the cookbook shelves to find another approach.

Last Saturday, thinking to take a prefabricated supper to a friend laid up after surgery, Lindsey made a triple-recipe beef stew, using an unusual recipe from Marcella Hazan's book Marcella Cucina (HarperCollins, 1997): Stewed Beef Cubes with Pickles, Capers, and Red Wine. It goes like this: Dredge your beef cubes in flour, then brown them in hot oil. In a saucepan, sweat to golden brown chopped onion and strips of pancetta in olive oil; when done, add finely chopped carrot, celery, cornichons, and capers; continue to cook a few minutes. Add the beef cubes, salt, and black pepper, and toss; then add red wine, let simmer a minute, then cook at a low temperature until meat is tender, about an hour.

We took half the result to our friend on Sunday, and put the rest in the icebox for ourselves. Yesterday was fast day Tuesday, and today Lindsey broke out the stew. As you see, we had it with egg noodles and some beautiful chard from our garden. The salad was a little unusual: with the customary lettuce, a few leaves of puntarella, also from the garden, chopped up, and some wild arugula leaves too — nice to see the little potager back in business. Oh: and an anchovy crushed into the salad dressing, because puntarella loves little fishes.

We had prefabricated dessert, too, because there were crèpes left from Sunday, which Lindsey dressed with a little Grand Marnier-flavored syrup. As I've said before, it's nice to have a pastry chef in the kitchen.

Cheap Nero d'Avola