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Flemish Carbonades
Take four pounds of beef--there is a cut near the neck that is suitable for this recipe. Cut the meat in small pieces (square) and fry them in a pan. In another pan put a piece of refined fat and fry in it five big onions that you have finely chopped. When these are well browned, add to them the meat, sprinkling in also pepper, salt, mixed herbs. Cover all with water, and let it cook for an hour with the lid on. After an hour's cooking, add half a glass of beer, a slice of crumb of bread with a light layer of mustard and three tablespoonfuls of best vinegar. Let it cook again for three quarters of an hour. If the sauce is not thick enough, add a little flour, taking care that it boils up again afterwards.
A working stew that assumes a coal range and a cook who tastes as she goes. Two things need attention: the beer quantity is vague, and the total cooking time is short for the cut named.
- The bread and mustard is the hingeThe slice of crumb spread with mustard is the thickener and the seasoning both -- it dissolves into the sauce and gives carbonades their characteristic body and faint sharpness. Push it under the liquid and leave it; do not stir it in as a lump or it will sit as paste.
- The cut"Near the neck" means chuck or shoulder clod. Buy 4 lb boneless chuck and cut it into 1 1/2-inch cubes, larger than the recipe's "small pieces" so they do not shred.
- Refined fatThis is rendered and clarified beef suet or lard. Beef dripping is the closest thing on a modern shelf; lard or a neutral oil works, butter alone will brown too fast under five onions.
- Cooking timeAn hour plus three quarters will not make chuck tender at a modern simmer. Reckon on 2 1/2 to 3 hours at a bare bubble, or covered in a 325F oven, adding the beer, bread and vinegar for the last hour.
- Half a glass of beerGenuinely ambiguous; perhaps 4 to 8 fl oz, depending on the glass. Substituting a whole bottle of a dark abbey ale or an oud bruin for some of the water is a modern reading, not what the recipe specifies.
- The vinegarThe recipe says only 'best vinegar'. Three tablespoons reads sharp today. Add two, cook, and correct at the end -- the balance wanted is faintly sweet-sour, not pickled.
- Mixed herbsProbably thyme, bay and parsley, though the recipe does not say. A modern dried 'mixed herbs' blend with sage and marjoram in it will pull the dish somewhere else.
- Yield and servingFour pounds of beef feeds six to eight. It is eaten with fried potatoes, or with boiled potatoes to take up the sauce, and improves reheated the next day.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in England during the First World War from recipes given by Belgian refugees, and its plainness is part of the record: these are dictated household dishes, not restaurant writing. Carbonade is generally traced to the same root as carbon, meat cooked over coals, though by the nineteenth century the Flemish version had long meant a beef and onion stew braised with beer -- the everyday alternative to the wine-based daubes of France, in a country where beer was what a kitchen had. The slice of bread spread with mustard, laid on top and allowed to melt into the sauce, is the old Flemish thickening trick and still turns up in Belgian recipes for stoofvlees a century later, often with speculoos or gingerbread standing in for the plain crumb.