Beef stroganoff

Thumbing through a few recipes on-line to see how other people tackle Stroganoff, I quickly discovered that it’s one of those dishes. The ones where even the “taught to me by a chef at the Kremlin so it must be authentic” recipes contradict each other at every turn. Apparently it should definitely include mushrooms or never include mushrooms, be spiced with paprika or be spiced with mustard, include white wine or include brandy, be cooked very quickly or cooked very slowly. You get the idea. Having always associated it with paprika I was particularly surprised to find that mustard probably is the authentic spice. Just about the only common theme is that you should use the most expensive bit of beef you can find. Fillet, ideally.

I do mine with skirt steak, because I have to be different and because I’m cheap.

The skirt steak is a very flavoursome yet reasonably priced piece of meat, but not often used. You may well not even see it on display at the butcher, in which case just ask. When you get a piece you’ll see that it’s very obviously fibrous in one direction, and so the two crucial tips for enjoying it are: (1) cut across the fibres when you cut it up, (2) cook it rare or at the very most medium-rare. If you need your beef well-done then you’ll have to cough up for fillet!

Beyond that, this is my own personal Beef Stroganoff and I don’t guarantee that it is authentic. I do guarantee that it is quick, exceedingly delicious, and that you won’t be able to resist serving yourself a big glass of red wine to go with it.

Beef Stroganoff (serves 2)

½ lb skirt steak (or fillet)
a few interesting mushrooms
1 onion, sliced
big knob of butter
1½ tsp smoked paprika
1 tbsp brandy
2 tbsp crème fraiche/soured cream
1 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley
squeeze of lemon juice
  1. Cut the skirt across the grain into roughly finger-sized pieces, set aside
  2. Saute the onion, mushrooms and paprika in the butter for a few minutes – you don’t want them browned or even totally soft. Season with salt and black pepper. Put them in a warm bowl
  3. Get the pan on a high heat, add a little oil, and swiftly flash-fry the skirt. You want to sear it, and you really want it rare inside. Nothing more than 30 seconds, perhaps a minute. Set it aside in a warm bowl
  4. Back in the pan go the onions and mushrooms, medium heat, add the brandy and cook for just a minute
  5. Add the meat, parsley, squeeze of lemon juice, and stir in the crème fraiche. Check seasoning. Just give it 30 seconds for the cream to heat through, then serve

I usually serve it on a bed of plain rice, but you could equally go with potatoes, chips, bread, whatever starch you want. But here’s the essential point: it’s a really, really quick dish. Also it’s divine.

Eating around France

I should warn you, this post does not describe a carefully researched trip targeting a handful of Michelin star-studded bastions of haute cuisine. Much though I’d love to do that! No, we spent two weeks touring some of the wine regions around France, with no planned itinerary, picking low- and mid-range places to eat in whatever city, town or village we ended up in. Surely in La Belle France of all places it ought to be easy to find good, honest local cooking almost by chance?

Wrong. We had two genuinely excellent meals out of about twenty, along with a whole bunch of instantly forgettable but at least digestible eats, and a handful of fairly dismal experiences. This usually involved paying over the odds for a plate of very ordinary slops.

I’m sure there are fuming Francophiles in the audience dying to tell me of all the brilliant places to eat, why, just in their own favourite little town in Provence! Not my point. The visiting tourist doesn’t have the benefit of familiarity, exploring all the options, inside advice and recommendations. And these days if their French isn’t great then the Guide Michelin isn’t much help – apparently no longer published in English.

We occasionally used our Rough Guide to France, which proved no better than random choices. We tried TripAdvisor twice, and were bemused by the rave reviews for underwhelming fodder. We asked local people for recommendations four times and got: (1) a place that turned out to be closed, (2) a decent chicken stew, (3) a dodgy concept restaurant and (4) “all the restaurants in our village are good”. This last was admittedly from a guy in the Tourist Info office, and he was wrong because the place we chose was merely adequate, and that’s being charitable.

Mostly we picked at random, using common sense. Avoiding the big central place with its row of brasseries willing to pay the high rent in order to flog overpriced fayre to all the tourists that naturally gravitate there. Picking places that have plenty of other people already dining. And trying to spot whether those other diners are locals (admittedly easier in Nepal than in France).

Anyway, a few recollections to round out the blog…

Why is everything always closed?

It sometimes feels like every other day is Christmas Day in France. We check-in to a hotel, head into town to find dinner, and wonder why on earth most of the restaurants are closed. Or arrive in a small town for lunch, and wonder when exactly these three shuttered-up restaurants ever open. Monday night in Avignon was particularly devoid of choice, and as the Mistral was trying to blow road signs down on us we took the first place we found – especially as a French couple outside told us it was good. It turned out to be a slightly odd buffet restaurant where you pick either 3, 5, 7 or 9 starters, then a main, then 3, 5, 7 or 9 desserts. Well, the starters were of course bite-sized (slurp-sized for the soups), and while mostly tasty they were just a collection of oddities on a plate. The mains were carvery joints, and the lamb was admittedly a very good piece. Nice boulanger potatoes, too. Desserts were back to mini-bites, ranging between okay and yuck. It felt like an awkward attempt to bring a party buffet to the high street, and I don’t much like party buffets anyway.

Nose to tail

While very much on-trend in England, the French have scoffed nose to tail as a matter of course for centuries. Without going near a high-end restaurant we enjoyed lamb’s feet and stomach lining, veal head and sweetbreads. I say enjoyed, but some of this stuff can get a bit ripe. One dish of andouillete (tripe sausage) in a cheesy sauce was so spectacularly pungent that it lingered on the breath for almost 24 hours no matter what combination of strong liquor and mints were administered.

TV chef

I find it a bit irksome when chefs put little advertisements for their new book on the tables at their restaurant. So when we sat down in a bistro in Arles and I spotted the TV screens in the corner showing not the latest Marseilles match but a DVD of the chef-proprietor putting some veggies through their paces, I was slightly put off. This bistro was a lower priced offshoot of his Michelin-starred joint next door (you really must see the website). And the food was very average for the price. Potatoes that are 50% burned and 50% raw do not average out at 100% cooked. The butternut veloute was pretty ordinary, while poached pear with chocolate sauce was just dull. The staff and the décor were both modern and tres chic, so why couldn’t the food have been presented a bit less ’80s? A wretched sprig of mint stuck in a poached pear, and what’s with all the oily bits of old lettuce on everything? Even on the soup?!?

Bangkok tartare!

Why is it so bloody hard to get a steak tartare in England? Our national degustatory sense of adventure has come on in leaps and bounds during the last two decades, so why is such a simple and delicious pleasure from over the Channel still denied me? In Grenoble we tucked into a unique take on the dish: Bangkok tartare. Chatting to the chef afterwards, he had included carefully fried garlic, lime, basil, ginger, sesame and various other oriental elements in place of the usual capers and such. It was simple and brilliant. He’d also used an excellent chunk of beef. Of course, this being France it was accompanied by boulanger potatoes and a vinaigrette-dressed salad. Fusion, c’est bon.

Foie bloody gras

I really don’t need to see another slab of cold foie gras with a bit of toast. And I really don’t want it in a restaurant with a Michelin star. The hideous vinegary fruit jelly accompaniment failed to elevate it beyond what it was: the same lump of chilled liver found on the menu of every brasserie from Calais to Cannes. Don’t get me wrong, I like a bit of foie gras on occasion. I was just astonished at how hard it was to spot a proper restaurant brave enough to leave it off the menu. Prawn cocktail was never so ubiquitous.

So, a couple of closing comments. Firstly: France is still a wonderland of great produce. I love the markets, the patisseries, the epiceries and the fromageries, all abundantly available in every town in France and scarce back home. Secondly: I wouldn’t dream of suggesting you’d do any better as a tourist eating out without research on a journey around Britain. I’d venture to suggest that Thailand and Malaysia are the only two countries I’ve visited where picking a place to eat randomly usually has a good outcome. But I’m surprised, given my halcyon memories of childhood holidays, that France doesn’t belong in that club either.

Take a trip to Champagne

Jump in the car, drive down to Dover, get on the ferry and go champagne tasting. Don’t blame me if you come home with three cases of great champagnes your friends have never heard of. And they’ll have cost less than the next eighteen bottles of froth you won’t have to buy in the UK, nicely covering the cost of the ferry and most of the petrol. If you’re diligent like us, you’ll also learn a lot about champagne while sampling more than fifty different bubblies. You may spend a fair proportion of your time a little tipsy. That’s my kind of weekend break.

The champagne region is an area of rolling hills in north-east France, the hilltops covered with bosky forest and every available inch of the slopes clad in noble vines. The town of Epernay is the very epicentre of champagne production, while the handsome city of Rheims is just to the north. So your first choice is whether to base yourself in the town or the city. You could take a rustic retreat among the vines, but then the opportunity to get cheerfully pickled on a wide variety of bubbles is somewhat reduced.

Rheims and Epernay

Rheims, although not surrounded by vines, is actually home to the cellars of most of the biggest champagne names, the “grand marques”. The best and most evocative cellar tours are here, in caves carved out of the chalk beneath the city streets. You’ve also got a nice cathedral, though admittedly we couldn’t find any champagne in it, and plenty of handsome streets lined with shops and places to eat. Oddly, we didn’t find many champagne bars and not for lack of searching. Then again, the locals think nothing of using champagne as a table wine with a light meal.

Epernay by contrast has a number of bars and cellars where you can sample a range of different local champagne producers (the grand marques can go hang, this is where the fun is). There are cellar tours along the Avenue de Champagne, an arrow straight kilometre of road lined with ostentatious villas belonging to various grand marques. Other than that Epernay is actually a rather dull town. In England it would be Bracknell. Champagne is an industry, this happens to be the town at the middle of it, and fate has decreed that it should not have the quaint geography or spiffy chateaux that would combine with the wine to make a really humming tourist spot. C’est la vie.

If you want an all-round weekend break, base yourself in Rheims and take a day-trip to Epernay. If you want to focus on exploring lots of small, independent champagne producers, base yourself in Epernay and take a day-trip to Rheims.

Independent champagnes

You really must take in one or two cellar tours of the grand marques, you’ll learn about how champagne is made and classified and the cellars themselves are spiffy. We’ve enjoyed visiting Mumm, Pommery and especially Ruinart. Mercier was pants. Of course all the tours involve a tasting at the end, with perhaps the chance to try some ruinously expensive fizz that you’d think twice before ordering at home. But I’m much more interested in enthusing about the independents…

Not all champagne is made by Messrs Moet & Chandon. And not all the makers you’ve never heard of are simply mass-producing plonk to slap with a Tesco label. There are small independents by the hundreds making champagnes of real character and quality, never seen beyond the borders of France. I mean it, hundreds. Okay, I’ve wiki’d, there are actually 19,000 champagne producers. Wow.

So pick a sunny day and tour the Marne valley or the Cote des Blancs in your car. Every village has scattered signposts listing a clutch of winemakers, arrows pointing off down little lanes in all directions. Some or all of them will be open for tasting and purchasing. Of course you can’t get round them all (even we couldn’t!) and you’ll have no idea beforehand which ones are good unless you’ve done some detailed research, but that’s half the fun. Don’t choose a Sunday, and Monday is probably dodgy too. Watch out for public holidays. And remain diligently aware of the fact that at 12 midday the restaurants open and everything else closes, wine cellars included. Then at 2pm every restaurant closes and the wine cellars open again. The French want you to run your day their way. Tasting is usually free, no obligation to buy, though some places ask a few euros for the tasting if you don’t purchase anything.

C is for Champagne

For the poor driver of the tour who has been sipping and hopefully spitting all day, allow me to introduce C Comme Champagne (literally “C is for Champagne” – like Sesame Street for grown-ups). This is a bar and cellar in Epernay down a little side-road which absolutely champions the small independent producers. They’ll have nine or so champagnes on tasting, and if that’s not enough then half-bottles for around £8 would open up a lot more options. There are other cellars in Epernay offering other tastings, so you can spread yourself further if you have the time, but C Comme is pretty definitive. Descending into their atmospheric cellar you are surrounded by rack upon rack of independent small-production champagnes, amiable studio photos of the family makers above each rack. There are over 300 champagnes and most bottles will be around the £15-£20 mark.

That’s why you bring your car. Well, the ferry is also cheaper than the Eurostar, but you can’t tour the vineyards without a car and you certainly can’t bring back a few boxes of whichever bubbly wines most tickled your fancy.

Cheers!

There now follows a postscript of pure wine geekery, for those interested…

Understanding champagnes

Champagnes are made out of three grapes: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. The process is different from ordinary wine in that there are two fermentations: in the first, the grapes are fermented

as usual to make a still white wine; in the second the still wine is fermented in sealed bottles, trapping the fermentation gases which dissolve back into the wine. That’s the fizz. The fermentation sediments are then removed from the bottle by an arcane process called “riddling” but I will you to learn all about that on your cellar tour.

In a classically balanced bubbly the Chardonnay provides acidity, brightness and a sense of terroir; Pinot Noir provides body, character and depth; Pinot Meunier provides fruit and balance. But you can enjoy a “blanc de blanc” champagne made with 100% Chardonnay (the only white grape of the three) or a “blanc de noir” made entirely with the two black grape varieties.

Rosé champagnes are typically made by adding a little red wine (also locally made) after the first fermentation, but more rarely the rosé can be made by leaving the red grape skin in during the first fermentation of the champagne wine for a couple of days before removing it. These methods are called “assemblage” and “maceration” respectively.

There are three things contributing to the high price of some champagnes: marque, cru and vintage. As mentioned before, the grand marques have been around a long time and are now world famous brands, so naturally they command a premium price. Of course they produce good champagne, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones doing so.

Within the Champagne region there are a handful of villages surrounded by Grand Cru vineyards, a bigger handful having Premier Cru vineyards, and plenty of villages with neither. So of course to be deemed a Grand Cru champagne producer you must make at least one champagne consisting entirely of Grand Cru grapes. This will definitely add some prestige (and price) to your bottle.

Most champagnes are “Réserve”, meaning they are non-vintage as they have been made with wines reserved from a couple of different years and mixed. This mix is important. Each champagne house has its preferred “style” of champagne, yet each year’s harvest may have a

markedly different balance of flavour and acidity. The art is in mixing years to ensure that your standard champagne remains roughly the same. So the attraction of a vintage champagne (labelled “Millésimé” and the year) is that it will represent the true character of that year’s grapes – for better or worse. If the year was exceptional, so will be the price of that vintage.

Review: Chutney Mary, Chelsea

The dining room at Chutney Mary is certainly a good place for a celebratory meal, especially if you can get a table under the conservatory at the back. Surrounded by palms with a leafy tree overhead you might almost – almost – be eating under the stars in a palace garden in Udaipur. The lighting is certainly set to about the same level that you’d get from a couple of big candles.

We opted for the tasting menu, and it started predictably with a scallop. Admittedly this one was set on a pool of pistachio sauce freshened with various bright spices and a blob of tomato relish. Yes, “various spices”. My palate for Indian food isn’t good enough to pick out all the various spices, not by a long chalk, so I’ll have to be descriptive rather than precise! Well cooked scallop, good sauce.

Next starter was a succulent piece of tandoori chicken with a tangy strawberry chutney. The tandoori flavour was spot on, as was the cooking. This was followed by a lamb chop, again extremely adeptly griddled and clearly good produce even through the spicing.

Our main course was something of a thali: four bowls appeared containing a lamb chakuti, a pungent Goan chicken curry, a tarka daal and a spinach dish akin to a saag bhaji. If my spelling of these dishes doesn’t match yours, then I’m only following in the footsteps of most Indian restaurants. Anyway, what to say about the dishes? I have to summarise, really. Each was good, a well-executed specimen of its type, although I’ve had better daals.

Service was friendly but a bit on the patchy side, drink requests forgotten and the like. Bringing out a cupcake with a sparkler in unbidden was a nice touch, except that the waitress presented it to my father whose birthday it was not. The birthday girl did get her cupcake, although the sparkler had by then fizzled out. Oh, and the waitress still wished my father happy birthday when we left.

So that brings me fairly swiftly to my conclusion. Despite the glitz of the reception area and the desire to seem gourmet by offering a “tasting menu” at £45, what we got at Chutney Mary was a very good and very traditional British curry (with a crème brulee for pud). And that’s odd. Because their menu offers a host of seemingly more interesting looking dishes, while the wannabe gourmands like us who opt for the tasting menu are given the safest options. Whyssat?

Oh well. I like Chutney Mary anyway. It’s a good place to go for a top-notch celebratory Ruby Murray, albeit at King’s Road prices.

Damsons and meringues

I’ve got a real lust for damsons at the moment, can’t get enough of them. I wish I could forage them easily, but wandering around Shropshire it seems as though every last damson tree is pretty much in someone’s garden and of course they pick the ripe ones for themselves. I would too! If you know (and love) damsons already then you’ll understand. If you haven’t paid much attention to them, I’ll try and explain. They’re like tiny plums, and tried raw they are indescribably tart and unloving. Damsons come to life when cooked, having a bold and unique flavour that is herbal, hedgerow and fruity all rolled together. I can’t think of any fruit I like better stewed.

But as usual I also can’t help fiddling. You’ll know of cardamoms, but may not have encountered black cardamoms. They are like the evil twin of the familiar green cardamom, giving a very dark and smoky version of the exotic cardamom flavour. So I like to squash a couple of black cardamom pods and add them to my damsoms, with half a stick of cinnamon and perhaps a couple of star anise before simmering them with a splash of madeira and a couple of big dessert spoonfuls of sugar (or honey) for about twenty minutes.

This compote adds immense character to yogurt or porridge for breakfast, or ice cream for pudding. In this case it makes a brilliant combination with soft meringues and some crème fraiche.

Damsons and soft meringues (serves 4)

Punnet of damsons
4 tbsp madeira
2 tbsp honey
3 black cardamoms
½ stick cinnamon
1 star anise
2 large egg whites
90g caster sugar
4 tbsp crème fraiche
  1. Put the damsons, madeira, honey, cardamoms, cinnamon and star anise in a small pan and bring to a boil, then simmer for 20 minutes or so
  2. Pre-heat the over to 150C and line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper
  3. Whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks in a clean bowl, then whisk in the sugar a dessert spoon at a time. Finally whisk in 1 tbsp of the liquid from the stewed damsons
  4. Scoop dessert spoons of the meringue mix onto the baking sheet. Pop into the oven and immediately turn it down to 140C
  5. Bake for 30 minutes, then turn the oven off and leave the meringues in for at least three hours
  6. Meanwhile get your fingers filthy digging through the damsons to remove all the stones. It’s that or just warn your diners to eat carefully and spit ’em all out!
  7. Serve by spooning some damsons into a bowl, then adding a couple of meringues, then more damsons and a spoonful of crème fraiche.
  8. Enjoy!