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Carbonades Done with Beer
Cut the meat into slices that are thin rather than thick. Mince two big onions and fry them till brown; then fry the slices till they are colored on both sides. Pour on them first some beer, then a dash of vinegar, adding thyme, pepper, and salt, and throw in also a slice of crust of bread, which you have spread with mustard. Let this all simmer for three hours.
A skeletal version of Flanders' most famous stew — the original assumes you know the proportions and gives none. What follows fills in the blanks without changing the method.
- The meat"The meat" here means stewing beef: chuck, shin, or blade, about 2 lb for four people. Slice it across the grain into pieces roughly 1/2 inch thick and 2 inches across, not the paper-thin slices the word "thin" might suggest, or three hours of simmering will shred them entirely.
- Quantities to work fromFor 2 lb of beef: two large onions as written, enough beer to barely cover (about 2 cups), a tablespoon of vinegar, a teaspoon of dried thyme. These amounts are modern suggestions, not the book's; recipes of this period commonly left quantities unstated.
- Which beerBelgian practice tends to favour a dark abbey-style ale or an oud bruin — malty, faintly sour, low in hops. Aggressively bitter beers such as modern IPAs are likely to turn harsh as the liquid reduces over three hours. A brown ale or dubbel is the safer choice.
- The mustard bread is the thickenerThe mustard bread -- That slice of mustard-spread crust seasons the sauce and also lends it some body as it dissolves over the long simmer, though one slice will not thicken it the way a roux would. Use a thick slice of stale country bread with a generous smear of sharp mustard, and stir it apart once it has softened.
- Brown properly, in batchesBrown properly -- The recipe does not say whether the onions come out of the pan before the beef goes in; either way, do not crowd the meat. Colour on both sides means real browning, since with no stock in the dish the browning, onions and beer carry all the depth.
- Three hours is not an exaggerationKeep it at the barest simmer, lid on, on the lowest burner; the recipe calls only for simmering and says nothing about an oven. A hard boil at that length toughens the meat and cooks the beer down to bitterness; the surface should barely move.
- Vinegar and balanceA dash means about a tablespoon. Taste at the end: if the beer has left the sauce bitter rather than rounded, a little brown sugar — or a spoonful of redcurrant jelly — is a common Belgian corrective and will pull it back.
- ServingServes four. Fried potatoes are the traditional accompaniment; boiled potatoes or bread for the sauce work as well.
Carbonades flamandes — beef simmered in beer rather than wine — is the Flemish counterpart to the French boeuf bourguignon, and the name comes from the same root as "carbonado," originally meat cooked over coals, later broadened to browned meat generally. The dish belongs to a brewing country: in a region with hundreds of local breweries and no vineyards, beer was the cheap, available braising liquid, and the mustard-smeared crust of bread is a thrifty domestic thickener of the sort that appears across northern European cookery. The bareness of the instructions is unremarkable: recipes of the period routinely assumed a cook who already knew the dish.