How to master Boeuf bourguignon

It is undeniably stew weather. I am, I’m afraid, one of those people who grimace all the way through summer, longing for autumn, thinking of fall-clichés: big cosy jumpers, afternoons spent reading on the sofa with a blanket, an excuse to bring out my knitting, rain drumming on the windows. Predictably, my greatest reason for embracing this time of year is the food it brings with it, and above all, is the presence of a casserole on the hob, bubbling away, slowly gaining body and flavour, and filling the kitchen with boozy, meaty, smoky smells. I have a lot of love in my heart for all kinds of stews, but boeuf bourguignon probably takes the crown.

Boeuf bourguignon was rightly famous before Julia Child came along, but in the cookbook that shot her to fame, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, it became synonymous with her, and with the French cooking that she introduced to American kitchens. In doing so, she described boeuf bourguignon as ‘certainly one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man’. It is, as she acknowledges, slightly more complicated than other beef stews (the daubes, the estouffades and the terrines), requiring browning of the meat, which adds additional stages to the cooking process. But it also this which makes it one of those most delicious beef dishes, eliciting a depth of flavour and a glossy mahogany-coloured sauce that those other beef stews could only dream of.

Boeuf bourguignon (in our house simply and blasphemously ‘beef bog’) is one of those dishes I’ve been making for years without regard to a recipe, and haven’t really interrogated. It was, to me, simply a pretty great beef stew with all my favourite things in it: beef braised until tender alongside tiny onions, button mushrooms, and smoky bacon, all cooked in a lot of red wine.