Bœuf daube

Eastside Road, February 3, 2014—

ANY BEEF STEW is fine with me, especially in winter. But my favorite beef stew is what's called bœuf daube in the south of France, where it's made in a special ceramic vessel, called, of course, a daubière. The daubière is shaped perfectly to its purpose: it's vertical, narrowing toward the top, with a good lid that slips inside the opening to minimize the loss of liquid through evaporation.

Alas, our own daubière is a little too small, just the right size for dinner for one, particularly because when you make stew you want to make double rations, because it only improves in the days after cooking. So I used a heavy copper pot with a close-fitting lid. Further alas: I couldn't find the book I generally cook my daube from, so settled on another: Michel Barberousse's Cuisine provençale (Editions chez l'auteur, Seguret (Vaucluse), n.d.), a curious book we picked up years ago. I simplified the recipe a bit, leaving out lard and substituting pancetta for French pork-belly, and adding a couple of turnips to the mix, probably inauthentic.

Otherwise I stuck to the page: I cooked the chopped pancetta in olive oil without browning it, added a couple of small carrots and a stick or two of celery, then a pound of cubed lean beef, a small onion studded with a half dozen cloves, a couple of little branches of thyme and savory, a bay leaf, and a fair-sized Roma tomato, quartered. After the meat had browned a bit I added half a bottle of red wine and the zest of an orange, and let the whole thing simmer four or five hours.

On the side I cooked another dozen or so cipollini onions and about that many white Paris mushrooms in a little olive oil, and Lindsey cooked up some potatoes. With a daube, pasta would have been more authentic: but, damn it, we like our praties. Green salad afterward, of course, and then an apple…

The stew before adding the wine	Cipollini and mushrooms cooking

Cheap Nero d'Avola (for lack of a good Vaucluse red)