[Beef sauté with Cream and Mushroom Sauce]
Nothing really does compare to a rich, flavorful dinner with friends, good wine and limitless time, and that’s what we had on Saturday night with a couple we haven’t spent much time with lately. Dinner was on the table well after dark, which was fine because the prep started quite late in the evening and it was, frankly, worth the wait.
I chose a beef sauté specifically because out of the beef recipes these were the shortest in preparation time, and so accomodated the end of Shabbat without putting our meal off until 10 PM. In effort to get things done in the time allotted, I was tempted to make one of the simpler variations on the sauté recipe; the Provençale iteration actually would only require omitting the butter to “kosherize.” But that recipe also includes olives, a flavor that I couldn’t substitute for on the fly, and something one of my guests strongly dislikes. Scratch that.
The Bourguignonne iteration (Sauté de Boeuf à la Bourguignonne) got me thinking quite a bit. It’s a beef sauté with red wine, mushrooms, bacon and onions. I could have easily omitted the bacon and, of course, butter, but I really have a problem with this and here’s why.
Not having always been Jewish, I am a rare specimen in that I’m a Jew who does not eat bacon, but knows what it tastes like. It’s a blessing and a curse, certainly. So I read the Bourguignonne variation of the recipe, wherein I am instructed to brown the bacon, reserve the bacon fat for later, and ultimately include both bacon and sauce containing rendered bacon fat in the final dish.
While I could easily pull a substitute (for example, chicken fat might be a good substitute here for the bacon fat, and the flavor from the fat might well disguise the lack of any substantial bacon replacement), the truth is that I don’t want to. I know what bacon tastes like, and I know that it offers not exactly just a flavor, but a whole sphere of flavor, texture and accent that will be hard to mimic. I’m now presented with an occasion where I’d rather not even try, because I don’t think that I can compete with what I’m sure in my head this recipe would taste like, though in fact I’ve never *actually* had this preparation.
Of course, the blessing side of this is that I do have a reasonable idea what this should taste like with bacon, and so while I don’t eat bacon now, I can evaluate how well a replacement approximates the “real thing.”
Needless to say, I skipped the sauté Bourguignonne and went with the original recipe, à la Parisienne. This required omitting the butter, as usual, and substituting pareve soy creamer for the whipping cream. This is perhaps the first recipe in the entire book that didn’t recommend rubbing the pan with bacon or somesuch; refreshing to be off that hook for once, and yet odd in that “who are you and what have you done with the real Julia Child recipe?” sort of way.
I did not disclose to my dinner guests, whom I am certain are reasonably free of food allergies and aversions (other than the aforementioned olive affliction), that I pursued the recipe under auspices of this blog. Not that it mattered, because as with the lobster I referred to in an early post, there aren’t circumstances where I’d throw cream into a meat recipe. In any case, my point is that this creamy, mushroomy, beefy recipe was prepared with discerning foodie-types in mind who didn’t know that this was a “kosherized” preparation, but who might reasonably be expected to notice.
Nobody particularly noticed. Ben tasted the sauce, which included sautéed mushrooms and shallots, reduced beef stock and pan juices, white wine, pareve soy creamer and thickened with a little bit of corn starch; and his one-word reaction was, “Beefy!” Other reactions included a vague comparison to Stroganoff, though “darker, less sour.”
I didn’t say, and no one noticed, that there wasn’t any bona fide dairy included in the sauce. Thus, I declare victory.
Making the sauce was truthfully a gleeful experience. After the wine and stock reduced down, pan juices were mixed in, and the mushrooms and shallots were added to the pan, THEN the faux-cream was added. The final step was the thickener after all the other ingredients were well combined: a well-blended tablespoon of creamer and tablespoon of corn starch. That had an immediate, dramatic effect that was fun to watch and very satisfying to stir – upon contact it felt and looked as if it had almost turned my sauce into fluffy clouds. (Julia Child referred to that texture as having “a light liaison.” I plan to hang on to that phrase.)
My only real disappointment with the final dish was that I was so focused on preparing the meat dish that I never remembered to toss out a vegetable side dish. I wound up serving the beef with a barley-rice-quinoa mix and a green salad with apples, dressed in olive oil with balsamic vinegar. I just felt that the plates were a little too brown looking, and could have been aesthetically improved by a couple of spears of asparagus or some grilled carrots, just something, anything, with a splash of color.
Despite my own criticisms, and I’m always harder on myself than anyone else is, I served it all up with pride and without apology. More than anything, this is my take-home message from Julia Child.
...she twote.