Carbonnade à la Flamande: give your stew a Flemish makeover

‘Casseroles,’ Julia Child wrote to her long-term penpal Avi DeVotos, ‘I even hate the name, as it always implies to me some god awful mess.’ On this, Julia and I are in full agreement: I have a real problem with the word ‘casserole’. And ‘stew’ for that matter. Both of them sound so unappetising, so school dinners. But Child and I are also aligned in our hypocrisy, because actually, deep down, I love a casserole, as long as you call it anything else.

Like me, despite her vocal opposition to the casserole, Child loved bourguignons and carbonnades, coq au vin and poulet poele à l’estragon, and wrote about them with enthusiasm and appetite. Of course, all of these are casseroles, just with fancy (or specific) names. I’m aware then, of how silly – and, frankly, pretentious – it is to object to the term. But the word is so off-putting. It sounds slimy to me, gloopy, and like it will probably contain some kind of frozen veg mix, and thickening granules. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a casserole is distinctly less appetising than a bourguignon.

Really, of course, a casserole or stew is just a dish that is braised slowly on the hob or in a low oven. Usually, this means that the meat is tender and falling apart, the veg is softened, the beer, wine, stock or water has thickened into a rich sauce, and all the constituent ingredients have had time to get to know each other, and become greater than their parts. It’s an economical way of making meat and veg go further, but it also brings out the best in hard, root veg, and cheap cuts of meat that need to be cooked slowly to break down their muscle and fat.

Despite my semantic objections, there’s no better way of cooking.