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Beef a la Bourguignonne
Braise three pounds of beef upon twenty little onions, ten mushrooms, and two glasses of red wine, salt, pepper, thyme and bay-leaf; cook for one and one-half hours with not too hot a fire. After that, place the beef on an oval dish; keep it hot; stir two tablespoonfuls of demi-glaze into the vegetables and let it boil up. Cut some slices of the beef, and strain the sauce over all.
A brief, professional-shorthand braise that assumes a cook who already knows the method. Two things need filling in: what "two glasses of red wine" means, and what demi-glaze is.
- The cut matters mostThree pounds of a single piece meant to be sliced points to a braising joint with structure — beef chuck roast, blade or top rump. It is browned first, which the recipe does not say, and 90 minutes at a bare simmer is short for a piece that size; expect closer to 2.5 to 3 hours if you want it to slice tenderly rather than resist the knife.
- "Two glasses of red wine"Period wineglass measures were not standardised; a "wineglassful" is variously reckoned at anywhere from about 2 to 4 fl oz, so two glasses might mean half a cup to a cup. The figure is genuinely loose. For a three-pound joint in a snug pot, roughly a cup of wine plus enough stock or water to come a third of the way up is a sensible reading.
- Demi-glazeDemi-glace: classically espagnole and brown stock reduced together until it coats a spoon, sometimes finished with a little madeira or sherry. Two tablespoons is a thickening and glossing agent, not a sauce base. A good reduced beef stock, or a spoonful of commercial demi-glace concentrate, does much the same work.
- "Not too hot a fire"A bare simmer, with the surface barely trembling. The recipe assumes a hearth or stovetop fire rather than an oven, but as a modern substitute a heavy lidded pot in a low oven (around 300F) will hold there without attention.
- Twenty little onionsPearl or small pickling onions, peeled and left whole. Twenty of them for three pounds of beef is generous by modern habit and correct by Burgundian habit — they are part of the dish, not a seasoning.
- The mushroomsTen mushrooms added at the start will be spent and grey after 90 minutes. If you want them intact, sauté them separately and fold them into the sauce with the demi-glace.
- ServingThree pounds serves six generously. Slice against the grain, spoon the onions and mushrooms around, and strain the liquid over — the straining is deliberate, giving a clear glossy sauce rather than a stew.
The name simply means "in the Burgundian manner," and in French cookery a la bourguignonne signals red wine, small onions and mushrooms rather than any one fixed dish. What is worth noticing here is the form: this is not the cubed, flour-dusted stew most English-speaking cooks now call boeuf bourguignon, but a whole joint braised and then carved, with the cooking liquid finished with demi-glace and strained -- the restaurant treatment, written down in restaurant shorthand. Its presence in a Belgian collection is unremarkable; Belgian bourgeois and hotel cooking of the period was largely French in vocabulary and technique, and collections of this kind often set homely national dishes alongside classic French preparations a Brussels household would have considered equally its own.