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Stew Milanaise
(Stufato alla milanese) Beat and flatten a good piece of meat and lard with bacon or ham cut in small pieces. Season with salt, pepper and a taste of cinnamon. Sprinkle flour over the meat. Place in a saucepan a little fat of beef chopped with a middle sized onion and brown with a piece of butter. When the onion is browned, remove it and place the meat over the melted butter. Brown with melted butter. Then fill the saucepan with half water, half red wine, but only when the meat is browned from all sides. Cover the saucepan the best you can, with cover and greased paper and let it simmer for five or six hours on a very low fire.
After removing the stew, let it cool, rub the gravy through a sieve, put again on the fire and serve hot. 173
A single-piece beef braise in the Lombard manner, closer to a pot roast than to a cubed stew. The original assumes a hearth fire and an animal that had worked for a living; both affect the timing.
- The cut"A good piece of meat" here means a whole braising joint rather than cubes: chuck, brisket point or shin off the bone would all suit. It is beaten flat, larded and cooked in one piece.
- LardingThreading strips of bacon or ham through the meat with a larding needle compensates for lean, dry beef. A modern well-marbled chuck does not need it; if you skip the larding, tie the joint so it holds its shape and add the bacon to the pan instead.
- Fat of beefChopped beef suet, rendered with butter to start the soffritto. Any neutral fat plus butter does the same job. The onion is browned in it and then discarded, which flavours the fat without leaving onion to scorch during the long cook.
- Greased paperA cartouche, buttered baking parchment pressed down over the meat under the lid. It cuts evaporation and keeps the exposed top of the joint moist. Foil crimped over the rim before the lid works the same way.
- The liquidHalf water, half red wine, added only after the meat has coloured on every side. The recipe says to fill the saucepan; using less, so that it comes only part-way up the joint, will give a more concentrated gravy. A dry Italian red is in character.
- Heat and time"A very low fire" means a bare tremble, roughly 195-210F in the liquid. The recipe asks for five or six hours; modern braising cuts will often be tender well before that, and past a point the meat shreds rather than slices.
- The gravyThe instruction to let it cool before sieving may be to make skimming, or slicing, easier. Sieving the cooking liquid takes out the solids, and it will likely want reducing and skimming before it is worth serving.
- Cinnamon"A taste" suggests no more than a pinch for a large joint. It should read as warmth in the background, not as a spiced dish.
- YieldA 3-4 lb joint serves six to eight, with polenta or risotto alla milanese, both usual in Lombardy.
Stufato simply means stewed or braised, from stufa, a stove, and the Milanese version is the northern Italian answer to the French boeuf a la mode: one large piece of beef, larded, browned in butter rather than oil, and held for hours over the gentlest possible heat. The butter and beef fat mark it as Lombard cooking rather than southern; so does the wine and the near-total absence of tomato. The pinch of cinnamon is a survival of the older Italian kitchen, where sweet spice in meat dishes is generally said to have persisted well into the nineteenth century and was still lingering in regional practice when this book was compiled.