Working man’s food I love to make and eat
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- August 27, 2021
- 1072
There are cuisines in the world that get little notice or even disparagement when laid up against, say, French food or Indian or just about anything Asian, and that may be broadly justifiable.
The western world owes an awful lot to French kitchens, from the nomenclature we use to describe processes to the overall techniques and cooking methods employed in just about every kind of cooking that doesn’t involve a wok.
Russian food, for example, after you pass stroganoff and borscht and a few other dishes, you’re out of gas. We don’t talk much about the breakfasts in Bali. But the low-hanging fruit of cuisine bashing is the United Kingdom, especially Britain, though it’s hard to imagine anything less appealing than Scottish haggis. British food is supposed to be famously bad, bland, overcooked, mushy and gray, but that’s pretty unfair.
The United Kingdom gives us some of the world’s great cheeses, beers, beef, lamb and cream. But looking through collections of recipes from Britain, you run into an awful lot of stewed organ meats, meat pies, odd fish stews and the fattiest “bacon” to be seen anywhere.
Fans of the James Herriot books recounting the life of a Yorkshire veterinarian will remember plenty of references to farmers' wives offering up a breakfast of fried slab of pork fat described as bacon by the cook.
I used to name my bulldogs after British dishes, so we had a Bubble and Squeak, which is a dish of cooked potatoes and cabbage mashed up together and fried, and a Tweed Kettle, named for salmon from the Tweed river cooked in a fish kettle, among others. I never tried to make either dish, and I expect Bubble and Squeak refers to the gassy aftermath of eating it.
The Brits eat something called bloaters, which are smoked and salted herring from barrels. Then there are the fried kippers for breakfast, stretched into kipper paste and jugged kippers.
Those folks are nothing if not brilliant at naming things, and my favorite has to be a dish called Singing Hinnie, a sort of oversized dry pancake that sings as it cooks. I don’t know if there are Waffle Houses in the U.K., but if there are and they don’t have Singing Hinnie on the menu, I’m not going there.
This dish is the sort of rough, beautiful working man’s food I love to make and eat. The beer adds a lot to the sauce, so don’t substitute Budweiser. The best way to get good stew meat is to buy a whole piece of chuck and cut it up yourself, though I know at least one area market that includes filet trimmings in the already cut-up pieces. If you get already cut pieces, ask what’s in there.
BEEF IN ALE
2 pounds beef for stewing, cut into bite-sized cubes
3 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons oil or bacon fat
2 large onions, chopped into evenly sized pieces
2 quarts beef stock
About 3/4 of a bottle of dark ale or stout beer
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 small bunch fresh parsley
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon mustard powder
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
2 medium potatoes, cut into cubes
Salt and pepper to taste
Mix together half the flour and mustard powder and add salt and pepper. Toss the cubed meat in this mixture. Heat the oil or bacon fat in a heavy-bottomed pan and brown the meat on all sides. You needn’t cook it completely but try to get good caramelized color all around. Remove and set aside. Cook the onions in the same pan until soft but not browned. Add the meat back to the pan and then add the stock and herbs, bringing the liquid to a boil and then lowering the temperature until the meat simmers gently for 15 minutes, covered.
Mix the rest of the flour with 1/4 cup of the brown ale or stout, whisking until smooth. Stir this into the simmering liquid, then add the rest of the beer. Simmer gently, covered, for 2 hours. Add the Worcestershire and then add the potatoes to the pot, cooking a further 30 minutes.