Beef stroganoff: rich and punchy when made properly

Beef Stroganoff has had its heyday: terribly popular with both restaurant chefs and dinner party hostesses of the 1950’s to 70’s, I can’t remember the last time I saw it on a menu or dinner table. It’s been relegated to buffet dishes and ready meals, beige and bland, insipid and gloopy. It sits in canteen chafing dishes, or is blitzed in the microwave, until it’s rubbery, grey, congealed. No wonder we don’t think of it fondly. Of course, that’s not how it should be. 

True beef Stroganoff is a treat: punchy and rich, with a silky brandy-spiked sauce made from beef stock, sour cream and mustard, covering sautéed onions and mushrooms and impossibly tender, rare meat. It’s a luxury dish, made with expensive cuts. But then, it should be, as it has lofty heritage. The origin story frequently given is that the dish was created in 1891 by a French chef working in the kitchens of Count Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov. This chef created the dish for a cookery competition and (cannily or sycophantically; you choose) named the dish after his employer. 

In this story, the Count is often ageing, and the strips of beef used in the dish were to account for his near-toothlessness. But, alas, this is not quite true. In 1891, the Count in question would have been 117 years old – which would seem pretty implausible, even if he hadn’t already died in battle 74 years earlier. But there are kernels of truth in the tall tale: the dish was named after the powerful Stroganov family, which was the wealthiest dynasty in Russia, from the time of Ivan the Terrible until the fall of Tsarist Russia. And the dish did win a St Petersburg cookery competition in 1891, put forward by a French chef called Charles Briere under the title ‘beef Stroganov’.