Around My French Table (48 page)

W
E ALL NEED A GREAT BEEF STEW
in our cooking back pocket, and this one's mine. It's fairly classic in its preparation—the meat is browned, then piled into a sturdy pot and slow-roasted with a lot of red wine, a splash of brandy, and some onions, garlic, carrots, and a little herb bouquet to keep it company. It finishes spoon-tender, sweet and winey through and through, and burnished the color of great-grandma's armoire.

I call this dish a
daube,
which means it's a stew cooked in wine and also means that it's made in a
daubière,
or a deep casserole, in my case, an enamel-coated cast-iron Dutch oven. However, a French friend took issue with the name and claimed that what I make, while
très délicieuse,
is not a daube, but
boeuf aux carottes,
or beef and carrots. She's not wrong, but I'm stubbornly sticking with
daube
because it gives me the leeway to play around.

My first-choice cut for this stew is chuck, which I buy whole and cut into 2- to 3-inch cubes myself. Since the meat is going to cook leisurely and soften, it's good to have larger pieces—larger than the chunks that are usually cut for stews—that will hold their shape better. (If you've got a butcher, you can ask to have the meat cut at the shop.) My favorite go-alongs are mashed potatoes (
[>]
), celery root puree (
[>]
), or spaetzle (
[>]
).

If you're serving a crowd, you can certainly double the recipe, but if the crowd is larger than a dozen, I'd suggest you divide the daube between two pots, or put it in a large roasting pan and stir it a few times while it's in the oven.

BE PREPARED:
See Storing for how to make the daube ahead—a good idea.

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Put a Dutch oven over medium heat and toss in the bacon. Cook, stirring, just until the bacon browns, then transfer to a bowl.

Dry the beef between sheets of paper towels. Add 1 tablespoon of the oil to the bacon fat in the pot and warm it over medium-high heat, then brown the beef, in batches, on all sides. Don't crowd the pot—if you try to cook too many pieces at once, you'll steam the meat rather than brown it—and make sure that each piece gets good color. Transfer the browned meat to the bowl with the bacon and season lightly with salt and pepper.

Pour off the oil in the pot (don't remove any browned bits stuck to the bottom), add the remaining tablespoon of oil, and warm it over medium heat. Add the onions and shallots, season lightly with salt and pepper, and cook, stirring, until the onions soften, about 8 minutes. Toss in the garlic, carrots, and parsnips, if you're using them, and give everything a few good turns to cover all the ingredients with a little oil. Pour in the brandy, turn up the heat, and stir well to loosen whatever may be clinging to the bottom of the pot. Let the brandy boil for a minute, then return the beef and bacon to the pot, pour in the wine, and toss in the bouquet garni. Once again, give everything a good stir.

When the wine comes to a boil, cover the pot tightly with a piece of aluminum foil and the lid. Slide the daube into the oven and allow it to braise undisturbed for 1 hour.

Pull the pot out of the oven, remove the lid and foil, and stir everything up once. If it looks as if the liquid is reducing by a great deal (unlikely), add just enough water to cover the ingredients. Re-cover the pot with the foil and lid, slip it back into the oven, and cook for another 1½ hours (total time is 2½ hours). At this point, the meat should be fork-tender—if it's not, give it another 30 minutes or so in the oven.

Taste the sauce. If you'd like it a little more concentrated (usually I think it's just fine as is), pour it into a saucepan, put it over high heat, and boil it down until it's just the way you like it. When the sauce meets your approval, taste it for salt and pepper. (If you're going to reduce the sauce, make certain not to salt it until it's reduced.) Fish out the bouquet garni and garlic and, using a large serving spoon, skim off the surface fat.

Serve the beef and vegetables moistened with the sauce.

MAKES 6 SERVINGS

SERVING
I like to use shallow soup plates or small cast-iron
cocottes
for this stew. Spoon the daube out into the little casseroles and let each guest dig into one.

STORING
Like all stews, this can be kept in the refrigerator for about 3 days or frozen for up to 2 months. If you are preparing the daube ahead, don't reduce the sauce, just cool the daube and chill it. Then, at serving time, lift off the fat (an easy job when the daube's been chilled), reduce the sauce, and season it one last time.

I
'D BEEN LOVING BEEF CHEEKS IN RESTAURANTS
for years before I bought a pair and cooked them for myself. Why was I so surprised to discover that they were really big? I must have been seduced by the cuteness of their name into thinking of them as little puffs of meat. It wasn't until I hefted them out of my market sack and laid them on the cutting board that I thought, of course they're big—cows are big! And the flavor of their cheeks is as big as their size. This is hearty, rich, rustic fare of the first order, even if some pretty fancy chefs in both France and America have given them favored-ingredient status.

One of those chefs is Yves Camdeborde, the Michelin-restaurant-trained Parisian chef who is credited with starting the neo-bistro craze. (In neo-bistros, the look is casual, the prices are low, and the food is as high quality and as finely prepared as it is in the luxe restaurants all the neo-bistro chefs originally cooked in.) Camdeborde, whose Le Comptoir bistro has been known to be booked months in advance, keeps these braised beef cheeks on his menu year-round—they're so beloved he can't possibly scratch them even at the height of summer.

Camdeborde's daube has two nice additions: chocolate and macaroni. The chocolate is stirred in at the end, and it's not so much a surprise as a mystery—the flavor's not easily picked up; the macaroni is just right and lighter than the more expected potatoes.

If you can't find beef cheeks—they're not an easy grab, given that each cow has only two and you're competing for them against the chefs in your neighborhood—buy a piece of chuck, remove any large hunks of fat, and cut the meat into four pieces.

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.

If you've got beef cheeks, cut them in half; if you've got chuck, cut the meat into 4 pieces. Pat the meat dry between sheets of paper towels.

In a large Dutch oven or other oven-going casserole with a cover, heat 2 tablespoons of the oil over high heat. When the oil is just about shimmering, add the beef. You don't want to crowd the pot, so do this in 2 batches if necessary. Brown the meat well on one side, 3 minutes or so, then turn and brown the other side. Lift the meat out of the pot and into a bowl, and season well with salt and pepper.

Pour out the oil and carefully wipe the bottom of the pot. Put the pot over low heat and add the last tablespoon of oil. When it's warm, add the carrots, onion, and bacon and cook, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes, or until the vegetables are almost soft; season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle the flour over the ingredients, turn the heat up just a tad, and cook, stirring, for about 2 minutes, to lightly toast the flour; you'll have a flour film on the bottom of the pot, and that's fine. Pour in the water and, with a wooden spoon, stir to scrape up any bits on the bottom of the pot. Raise the heat and cook away the water (it will boil away rapidly), then pour in the wine and broth and stir.

Return the meat to the pot, adding any juices that have accumulated in the bowl, and bring to a boil. Boil for a couple of minutes, then seal the pot tightly with aluminum foil, settle the cover over the foil, and slide the pot into the oven. Let the daube braise for about 2 hours, or until fork-tender, undisturbed.

Shortly before the daube is ready, put a big pot of salted water on to boil. Add the macaroni and cook until it is 3 minutes shy of done. Drain.

When the meat is done, pull the pot out of the oven, skim off whatever fat has accumulated at the surface of the daube, and stir in the chocolate. Taste for salt and pepper and bring to a gentle simmer.

Stir the macaroni into the daube and finish cooking it, then serve.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

SERVING
At Le Comptoir, the daube is served in its own small cast-iron Dutch oven or
cocotte.
At home, bring your Dutch oven to the table and serve family-style, or spoon individual portions into shallow soup plates and then bring to the table.

STORING
Without the macaroni, the daube can be made up to a day ahead, cooled, and refrigerated; it will be only the better for the rest. It can also be packed airtight and frozen for up to 2 months. Reheat gently and thoroughly before adding the macaroni and serving.

T
HIS IS THE MAIN COURSE OF CHOICE
for my New Year's Eve dinners because it's got everything going for it in the party-food department. It's wonderfully satisfying, elegant, universally appreciated (among carnivores, of course), expandable—you can make it for twenty as easily as you can for two—and ninety percent do-aheadable, so you need to be away from the action for only a few minutes just before serving.

The dish is a pared-down, luxury edition of pot-au-feu, the traditional one-pot meal that usually includes several cuts of meat cooked in bouillon. Here you've got just one piece of meat, a fillet of beef, tied with a length of kitchen twine that's got a tail long enough to grab, so that you can pull the beef from the broth and rightly call the dish "beef on a string." This version also has a handful of root vegetables that poach in the bouillon, which is made from bones, vegetables, and, yes, a couple of bouillon cubes. (See the story about making this in Paris on
[>]
.) The bouillon is prepared ahead, days ahead if you can manage it, and the vegetables can also be made ahead. At serving time, all you've got to do is poach the meat lightly and gently. And there's never a need to worry about whether guests want their meat rare or well-done: you poach the beef until rare, let it rest, and then, at serving time, pour hot bouillon around the beef for the rare-lovers, or over it, to cook it a bit more, for those who like their meat better done.

Traditionally the bouillon is served as a first course and the meat and vegetables as the main, but I like to serve slices of the beef in shallow soup plates surrounded by the vegetables and finished with a small ladleful of broth. Using just a bit of the bouillon moistens the dish perfectly and gives it a lovely look, while leaving some to be turned into soup the next day. Actually, speaking about holding back, you might hope for leftover beef as well—it's wonderful in Next-Day Beef Salad (
[>]
).