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Carbonade of Flanders
Cut your beef into small neat pieces. Mince some onions finely, and for five or six people you would add two bay-leaves, two cloves, pepper, salt; simmer gently for three hours in water, and at the end of that time bind the sauce with cornflour. Some people like the sauce to be thickened instead with mustard.
A stripped-down carbonade: no beer, no browning, no fat given. The proportions are left almost entirely to the cook, so the notes below fill in what the original assumes you already know.
- Quantities"For five or six people" implies roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of beef and 2 to 3 large onions, though the original specifies neither; only the aromatics are given amounts.
- The cutThree hours of gentle simmering wants chuck, shin or blade. The recipe asks only for "small neat pieces". Anything lean and quick-cooking will be dry and stringy long before the time is up.
- Brown first, even though it does not say soThe name is usually traced to carbo, coal, meat cooked over the fire, though that link is traditional rather than instructional. Colouring the beef and the onions in dripping or butter before the liquid goes in is what separates this from boiled beef, and fuller versions of the dish generally assume it.
- Simmer, do not boil"Gently" is the operative word: bare bubbles for three hours, lid on, on the lowest burner. A rolling boil in three hours will shred the meat and cloud the sauce.
- Water, not beerMost Belgian carbonades are built on brown ale; the reason water is called for here is not stated. Enough water to barely cover is right; more and you will be thickening a great deal of thin liquid at the end.
- CornflourBritish cornflour is American cornstarch. Slake a tablespoon or two in cold water, stir it into the simmering pan and let it cook a minute; added dry it will lump.
- The mustard variantWhisk a tablespoon of strong mustard into the hot liquid off the heat. Mustard thickens only slightly and loses its pungency if boiled, so this makes a looser, sharper sauce rather than a bound one.
- ServingPotatoes, boiled or fried, are the usual Belgian accompaniment. The stew improves overnight and reheats without harm.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and it reads accordingly: short, unfussy, dictated from memory rather than copied from a manuscript. Carbonade is generally traced to the Latin carbo, coal — meat cooked over the fire — and in Flanders it settled into a long-simmered beef and onion stew, most often with brown ale and a slice of mustard-smeared bread stirred in to thicken it. Both are absent here. Whether that reflects the plainer end of Flemish home cooking or simply what a displaced household could get hold of in wartime England, the bones of the dish survive: beef, onions in quantity, bay and clove, and time.