by Simon Schama
Beat the whites preferably by hand with a balloon whisk, but an electric beater works just fine, until they form soft and floppy peaks.
Using a flexible plastic or rubber spatula, fold the cheese-mustard mix into the whites (or vice versa, it really doesn’t matter). What does matter is that you fold, not beat or aggresively stir. Folding just means diving the spatula to the bottom of the bowl, lovingly bringing it up and over again to blend the mix. It’s always much better to undermix than lose air by thrashing it into submission.
When the mixture is nicely married, pour into the buttered, flour-dusted soufflé dish. It should fill all but 1cm below the lip. With a knife, cut a circle in the top of the mix – to create a crown – and sprinkle over the finely grated Parmesan.
Set the soufflé dish in the oven and turn the heat down immediately to 175˚C.
While the soufflé is cooking, assemble a simple salad – watercress or rocket with a light dressing, a little acid to cut against the creaminess of the soufflé.
Bake for twenty-five minutes before peeping. Test doneness with a skewer. It won’t collapse. If the skewer comes away cleanly and, depending on whether you want an oozy, flowing centre or a drier soufflé, stop right there or cook for another four minutes. Serve with the watercress salad or a dish of crsipy cavolo nero or spinach.
Simmer of Love
Vogue, February 2008
Whoever would have thought that a writer as bony as Virginia Woolf would be the one to extol the majesty of beef stew in all its gloppy glory? In To the Lighthouse, Woolf transforms a dinner party, wretched with unspoken strong feeling, into a moment of tender communion. What accomplishes this miracle? A Swiss maid sets down on the table a big brown pot of boeuf en daube. Suddenly, everything and everyone is enveloped in the welcoming fug of meaty steam. Aromas of bay and wine hang benevolently over these tediously self-absorbed types. Flinty minds liquefy. The ladle ladles, they all tuck in, human sympathy descends on the refined company. They begin to resemble actual human beings. The beleaguered hostess, Mrs Ramsay, is so swoony at her ‘triumph’, through which egotism has melted into the ‘confusion of savoury yellow and brown meats’ lying in the casserole, that she commits a white lie, claiming the dish is ‘a French recipe of my grandmother’s’ when in fact it is (needless to say) the creation of her cook, Mildred.
And, for a moment, you, too, reader, are held in a contented drool. Unless, that is, you are a cook – which, you then suddenly realise, Mrs Woolf could not possibly have been herself. Boeuf en daube? Yellow meats? What ‘yellow’ meats? A chicken foot lurking in there along with the beef and onions, is there? And then the credibility of the scene falls apart just like a lengthily braised joint, except less appetisingly. For now you also recall that, a few pages previously, Mrs Ramsay had been agitated that her diners would not assemble on time because, she worries, where a boeuf en daube is concerned, ‘everything depended upon being served up to the precise moment they were ready. The beef, the bay leaf and the wine – all must be done to a turn. To keep it waiting was out of the question.’ But this description, from the most fastidiously observant English novelist of the twentieth century, is exactly what a daube is not.
Stews are the most forgiving dishes. Under their tight-shut lid they can be allowed to simmer away for hours on end, provided they don’t dry out – which they won’t if you buy cuts with enough fat to lubricate the slowly dissolving tissue, and so long as you poke your nose in the pot from time to time to check for dwindling juice. Stews seem to possess an organic vitality independent of the cook. Left alone overnight, even in the fridge, benevolent unions and fusions happen, so that the longer they go on, the better they get. Eating a stew on the day it’s cooked is okay. Eating it the day after is an improvement, and spooning down a bowlful for breakfast two days later is a wholly different experience from cornflakes. It’s this steady gathering of richness, the accumulating intensification of flavour that, over the centuries, made stews a rare sustenance amidst the emaciated life of the rural poor, for they could be simmered in an iron cauldron over a slow fire, or set in a bed of cinders waiting to be devoured after a long day of herding or harvesting. They are the dish par excellence of cultures without timepieces.
Early French cookbook writers like Menon, who equated social stability with the culinary traditions of the terroir, praised the marmite perpetuelle – the perpetual poultry-pot, never allowed to be emptied or taken from the heat, so that the broth left from the long poaching of one bird would then welcome the arrival of the next, which in turn would contribute its own golden oozings, on and on for ever in a great unbroken chain of nourishment. When the marmite perpetuelle seemed to have vanished from rural cuisine at the close of the nineteenth century, its elegists thought the end of true cooking was nigh.
How odd is it that being ‘in a stew’ is a description of sweaty anxiety when, in fact, the food is a balm for the fretful: a slow, voluptuous yielding, long bundles of fibre softening in a gently bubbling bath of oily wine or, in the Flemish carbonnade, yeasty beer. We think of stews as wintry comforts but they are sure-fire proof against dirty weather, hot or cold. The most satisfying daube I remember making was in the summer of 1972 when an ugly Mediterranean storm-system stalled over the Côte d’Azur, where I was holidaying with a girlfriend in a walk-up rental in Cagnes-not-really-sur-Mer. The place wasn’t much to talk about, but the tiny kitchen boasted a mighty marmite. After an overnight marinade of the beef in local olive oil (no cold-pressed extra-virgins known in 1972, not to us anyway), barnyard-smelling red Minervois wine, a tablespoon of vinegar and a fist of herbs and garlic, we rendered some cubed bacon in the morning, softened some carrots in the fat so they took on a vivid glaze, and let the usual mess of sliced onions and garlic go gently translucent. I had brought along with me the bible of all novice cooks, Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking, and it was her daube provençale that we made, throwing in a greasy slab of salt pork, some sprigs of thyme and parsley and oregano, bay leaves from the tree outside the old limestone house, a handful or two of black olives, a few bashed peppercorns and some curls of orange zest. The storm growled overhead in an inky sky, wooden doors in the hilltop village banged, and stray cats screeched in the lightning. Wishing the stew a happy simmer, we went to bed, the scent of Provençal thyme welling through the rooms. Every so often we’d get up to slurp the mysteriously harmonising concoction from a big old spoon or throw some rough cognac on the surface, setting light to it for cheerfulness’s sake, hoping not to incinerate the rental. It was meat and drink, breakfast, lunch and supper, that sumptuous daube. We wiped bowls with hunks of stale baguette or ate it on beds of slippery noodles, beads of oil glimmering on the pale ribbons as the feast saw off the bullyboy thunder. The festive, recklessly amorous Elizabeth, we thought, would have approved.
So if there’s joy promised in the consumption of a richly cooked stew, why don’t we see more of them on the menus of ambitious contemporary restaurants? Partly, I suppose it’s because their messiness doesn’t sit well in a plating culture that wants you to ooh and aah at the exquisiteness of presentation; a thin tile of (please God, no) sea bass, skin side up, its silvery surface demurely crisped at the edges, perched just so on a plinth of spinach while teeny-weeny broad beans do a dainty little dance around the perimeter of the dish. Cute. Stewing meat of whatever kind is never cute; it’s the slob on the plate, leaking incontinently towards the beckoning mash. But gastro-aesthetes are wrong to write off stews as simple stuff. Done right, they are complex compositions, but they are, certainly, earthy: redolent of the farmyard and not for the dainty. In Oklahoma some years ago, I was treated to a bowl of burgoo. Even if the squirrel was, as I suspected, yard-kill, who cared when it luxuriated in a brick-colour smoky sauce of chipotle chillies, plum tomatoes, garlic and beer? A true civet – whether classically of hare or any other four-legged critter – is defined by two additions to the pot: the onions or chives from which the dish gets its name, and the blood of the animal stir
red in before final reheating. Among American cowboys, as my friend Blanquette reminded me, sonofabitch stew, made from brains, tripe, hooves, innards, tongue and ‘mountain oysters’ (balls, to you) – in fact, anything that doesn’t get to be hamburger – is still prime rodeo fare.
There’s also the sense among contemporary chefs that boeuf bourguignon and its kindred stews are old hat; along with the paprika-lurid goulashes and coqs au plonk that featured heavily in the Paris bistros of the Fifties, like Chez Allard and Louis XIV on the place des Victoires, and which gave Anglo bohemians groaning from limp veg and leathery beef the impression they had arrived in a real-food world. In the Sixties those dishes, served with halfway decent bread, became the staple of the first London ‘bistros’ I could afford, like the Chanterelle in Chelsea, places where (unlike today) you went to be unseen, except by your romantic prospect. Never mind the flouncy waiters in their blood-red shirts, a plateful of coq au vin seemed a declaration of class war on the aristo fare at toffish places like the Mirabelle, with their anaemic sole sitting in a puddle of béchamel. We smoked Gitanes hung on our nether lip, Belmondo-style, across from turquoise-eyeshadowed dates dragging artichoke leaves through their incisors.
Or, courtesy of Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and, later and more dauntingly, Mesdames Bertholle, Becks and Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, we would whip up our own versions of boeuf bourguignon on a solitary, erratically sputtering gas ring in a college staircase kitchen, much to the horror of the Cambridge cleaning ladies, who smelled nasty habits along with the nasty garlic.
And it was a bonus that those of us who were historians were, we thought, cooking (in the most legitimate way) our research, as well as vice versa. High politics turned us off as much as haute cuisine. Instead, we marinated ourselves in Fernand Braudel’s history of the food migrations of the centuries; the Europeanisation of exotic foods like sugar or spices like pepper and cloves. The revolutions we really rated as world-changing were the appearance of the American potato and tomato, not the storming of the Bastille. Redcliffe Salaman’s epic history of the tuber was a must-read (it still is). Before long our cookbooks were also our texts of history and ethnography: Alan Davidson’s stupendous works of encyclopaedic scholarship; Elizabeth Ayrton’s The Cookery of England, which introduced us to cooks like Gervase Markham in the seventeenth century, Elizabeth Raffald and the punchy Hannah Glasse in the eighteenth. In the British Museum Reading Room I’d play truant from teaching undergraduates Abelard or Eisenhower and dally instead with Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (1660) or Varenne’s Cuisinier Français (1651). And gradually I became aware of the epic battle between Spit and Pot. Spit People were aristocratic roasters; birds and beast, trussed and turned; Pot People were the plebs: lengthy braisers.
There was never any doubt I was a Pot Person. The closest my mother – who grew up in the Jewish East End, and whose idea of lamb stew was something worryingly thin and grey – ever got to rhapsodising about food was when she described taking the iron pot of cholent (the stew of meat and vegetables – which, if done right, had raw eggs in their shells buried within) to a communal baker’s oven before the onset of the Sabbath on Friday night. Nothing, she said, was quite like taking the lid off the cholent pot by the time the family got back from synagogue the next day. ‘Taam gan eden,’ she would murmur dreamily – ‘The taste of the Garden of Eden.’
Stews are the inclusive food, uniting multitudes – your family, your friends, your tribe – around the same capacious, endlessly nourishing pot. When the Grand Constable of the Dauphiné, during a time of religious war at the end of the sixteenth century, wanted to win friends and allies, he’d bring his grande marmite to town and put on a spread for 500. A surviving recipe written in his hand calls for, among other ingredients, 160 pigs’ trotters (a good source of gelatine thickening), 100kg of beef, 40 bottles of red wine, 24 of white, 32 chickens and 25kg of mushrooms. But this was small potatoes compared to the great sancocho of Caracas, in which, earlier this year, in a mass demonstration of Chavezian state philanthropy (or megalomania), a single pot containing 5,000kg of meat and 7,000kg of vegetables, including yucca, okra and plantains, bought the loyalty of at least 17,000 satisfied Venezuelans.
Stews are bringers of contentment to a discontented world. I don’t know of any other kind of food, except perhaps freshly baked bread and cakes, guaranteed to fill a kitchen with such a sense of abundance. They violate all the cool modern conventions, for they demand fat and time and copious carbs – mashed potatoes or parsnips, pasta or bread – to soak up the juicy mess. You’ll have skimmed much of the killer grease half an hour or so before serving, so there’s no obligation to cleanse the palate with anything sharply green. Don’t even think about spinach, though the collapse of a summer salad on an oily plate is one of the table’s great acts of surrender. Forget about anything leaner or meaner (like green beans): that’s like inviting Lent to the carnival. And as the winter nights close in and the craving for those unctuous, oozing, life-sustaining stews becomes irresistible, do yourselves a favour: make a large pot at the weekend and it will last all week, nourishing your very own Perpetual Pot of Pleasure.
Stew recipes
Boeuf en daube provençale
(Remembered and adapted from Elizabeth David)
Time: 3 hours 30 minutes (plus marinating time)
Serves 6
1½kg stewing beef, cut into 2½cm cubes
For the marinade:
2 tbsp olive oil
2 medium carrots, coarsely sliced
1 stick celery, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3 medium shallots, finely chopped
1 tbsp rosemary, chopped
1 tbsp thyme, leaves stripped from sprigs
1 tbsp flat parsley, finely chopped
12 peppercorns, cracked
a pinch of salt
1 bottle robust red wine – Gigondas or Cahors
For the stew:
plain flour for dusting
1 tbsp olive oil
200g streaky bacon or pancetta, diced
2 garlic cloves, smashed but not chopped
2 bay leaves
1 tbsp fresh thyme
4 good-quality anchovies, minced (optional)
zest of ½ medium orange
50g good-quality black olives
125g mushrooms
75ml cognac
fresh parsley, finely chopped, for garnish
Prepare the marinade one or two days in advance of serving the daube: heat the olive oil in a frying pan and sauté the carrots, celery, garlic, shallots and herbs on a medium-low heat for about three minutes, until the herbs release their aroma.
Put the beef in a bowl, combine with the marinade, season with the pepper and salt and add the wine. Cover and leave overnight. If steeping longer, turn the meat in the marinade every few hours.
When you are ready to cook the daube, use a slotted spoon to remove the beef from the marinade, pat dry on paper towels and dust with flour.
Pre-heat the oven to 125°C, gas mark ½.
On a medium heat, heat the oil and fry the bacon or pancetta in a casserole until it begins to crisp. Remove the bacon from the pot and set aside. Turn up the heat and brown the beef in batches.
Return the bacon to the dish, add the beef and marinade, and then the garlic, bay leaves, thyme, anchovies (if used) and zest. Put on the lid, place in the oven and cook for at least three hours, until the meat falls apart.
About thirty minutes before serving, add the olives and mushrooms, and continue to cook. Warm the cognac in a ladle, pour over the stew and set it alight.
Garnish with parsley and serve from the pot with bread or flat noodles – the traditional Provençal way.
Chickpea-lemon chicken stew with couscous
Time: 1 hour 30 minutes (plus soaking time)
Serves 4
425g chickpeas (prepare as below, but if you are short of time, use tinned and drain and rinse w
ell)
1 small onion, peeled
2 garlic cloves, peeled
For the stew:
4 tbsp light olive or safflower oil
2 large onions, thinly sliced
4 cardamom pods, cracked
2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp cumin seeds
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp cayenne
½ tsp ground ginger
1 tsp coriander seeds, coarsely crushed
1 organic chicken, cut into 8 pieces
the juice of 3 lemons (if possible unwaxed)
250ml chicken stock
1 lemon (preserved if possible), cut into pieces
15 green olives, pitted
salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
fresh parsley or coriander for garnish
Prepare the chickpeas before cooking the stew: place them in a colander and rinse well. Then put them in a bowl of cold water at room temperature and soak overnight. Transfer to a saucepan over a medium heat, add the whole onion and garlic cloves, bring to the boil, then remove from the heat and leave to soak for two to three hours, until almost tender.
Heat two tablespoons of the olive oil in a tagine or casserole dish on a low heat and sauté the onions, cardamom pods, turmeric and cumin seeds for ten minutes, until the onions are soft but not brown.
Add the garlic, ground cumin, cayenne, ground ginger and coriander seeds, turn the heat up to medium and fry for a further three minutes.
Remove the spiced-onion mix and set aside in a bowl. Add the remaining two tablespoons of oil to the casserole and brown the chicken pieces on a medium heat for about ten minutes, until golden. Season with a little salt and pepper, then add the lemon juice and chicken stock to the pot so that the chicken pieces are fully covered.
Put a lid on the pot and simmer on a medium heat for thirty minutes.