French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [195]
This daube is a useful dish for those who have to get a dinner ready when they get home from the office. It can be cooked for 1 hours the previous evening and finished on the night itself. Provided they have not been overcooked to start with, these beef and wine stews are all the better for a second or even third heating up. The amounts I have given are the smallest quantities in which it is worth cooking such a stew, and will serve four or five people, but of course they can be doubled or even trebled for a large party; if the meat is piled up in layers in a deep pan it will naturally need longer cooking than if it is spread out in a shallow one.
DAUBE DE BŒUF CRÉOLE
NEW ORLEANS DAUBE OF BEEF
From a little book of New Orleans cookery published under the name of Madame Bégué, who many years ago had a restaurant in that city of traditional good cooking, comes an interesting variation on the Provençal daube of beef, adapted by the Creole cooks to accord with the ingredients available locally. The meat is studded with olives and cooked with rum instead of wine; and the curious point is that although the result is a very rich-tasting dish I think few people would be able to detect the presence of the rum, or to say in what precise way the stew differs from the French original.
2 to 3 lb. topside or round of beef in one piece, a dozen pimento-stuffed olives, lb. of salt streaky pork or bacon, a large onion, 4 or 5 tomatoes, bouquet of herbs, butter or dripping, half a teacup of rum, salt and pepper, garlic.
Trim excess fat from the meat, and make a double row of deep incisions on each side; in these stick the olives, each one cut in half lengthways. Tie the meat into a good oblong shape. Slice the onion and let it take colour in a little butter or dripping heated in an earthenware or other stewing-pot of about 2 pints capacity. Put in the salt pork cut in cubes, and when the fat from this starts to run put in the meat and let it brown a little on each side. Now heat the rum, set light to it and pour it flaming over the meat. Shake and rotate the pan until the flames die down, then add the tomatoes, skinned and roughly chopped, a clove or two of garlic crushed with a knife, the bouquet of herbs (bayleaf, fresh parsley, a sprig of thyme and dried basil if you have it) tied with a thread, a very little salt and quite a lot of freshly-milled pepper. Cover with a sheet of greaseproof paper or foil and a lid. Cook in a very slow oven, Gas No. 1, 290 deg. F., for about 3 hours.
Remove the bouquet before serving and crush the tomatoes into the sauce with a wooden spoon. The sauce will be rather rich and highly flavoured, and the best accompaniment is either a dish of plain rice or, in the Provençal fashion, some plainly boiled noodles mixed with a little of the juice from the meat.
In the original recipe, which I have adapted somewhat because of its vagueness as to cooking methods, the meat is larded with the salt pork as well as the olives, but to my taste this tends to make the meat over-salted.
Although at a first glance readers may find it curious that this recipe, and two or three others which do not belong strictly to metropolitan France, should be included in this book, these recipes seem to me to be of great interest as showing the way in which French cooks develop their dishes in different countries. At home they tend to be extremely conservative and would very likely be horrified at the idea of using rum instead of wine in a stew or of serving a leek and potato soup iced with cream as did Louis Diat when he turned potage bonne femme into vichyssoise glacée; but when they settle abroad they soon realise that if they are going to be well fed they must also be flexible in the matter of adapting local ingredients new to them. Wherever the French have settled or French chefs have been employed one finds interesting variations on the old regional dishes of France itself.
ESTOFAT DE BŒUF ALBIGEOIS
BEEF STEW WITH RED WINE AND BRANDY