Two seasons, two days, two dishes

For all that the sun has had his hat on several times this last week, the evenings are pulling in and the air is cooling.

It is an inescapable fact that autumn is on the way. And it seems that the record-breakingly wet summer, combined with the late burst of sun and heat, could conspire to produce a spectacularly colourful season.

But while we have a while to wait before we see whether that technicolour explosion actually transpires, an itch has started for seasonal comforts on the plate.

And the weekend gone provided opportunities and encouragements to straddle two seasons in just two days and two meals.

With tomatoes both ripe and ripening, a meal was needed that allowed them to take centre stage.

A pomodoro seemed to be the perfect casting solution.

But there was a complication, since doing a traditional tomato sauce requires far more tomatoes than I had.

There seemed to be one sensible way to deal with this.

So, for two, for a main course:

Take a medium onion and chop finely. Sweat gently in olive oil. Add some finely chopped garlic and continue to cook gently.

Chuck in a tin of chopped tomatoes – in just their own juice.

Let that cook gently for a while.

Check the seasoning.

Add the fresh tomatoes – mine were all small enough that they didn’t need cutting, let alone skinning.

Continue to cook gently until the skins have just split.

Serve over pasta.

Adding the whole tomatoes at the end freshens up the sauce and adds a different bit of texture.

It also allowed the chance to really appreciate the baby orange plums, which were light and sweet as anything. It’s almost a shock to the system to taste such tomatoey sweetness in the UK – and it was most welcome.

For Sunday, I’d decided to go down the slow, slow route.

So on Saturday evening, I sliced carrot and celery, cut some rump into large, bite-size pieces and popped everything in a bowl with a bottle and a bit of red wine, plus thyme, bay and juniper berries.

And it stayed like that until late Sunday morning.

The most fiddly part of the job that follows is draining everything – keep the marinade – and then drying the meat. But it’s worth taking a bit of time to make sure it is all dry.

Then take a cut clove of garlic and smear it around your casserole. Add a good knob of lard and melt.

Add the meat – in batches if necessary – and brown.

In the meantime, in a large pan, pop some diced, smoked streaky bacon, and cook gently until the fat is coming out of the meat.

At that point, add a couple of chopped onions and two or three cloves of garlic, and continue to cook gently until the onion and garlic start taking on a hint of gold.

Add a sliced carrot and a peeled, diced potato, plus two large tomatoes, skinned and chopped, and let it all cook gently for a minute or two.

Now add the marinade. Bring it to a boil and let it bubble and reduce a bit for five to 10 minutes.

Decant all of this into the casserole with the meat, and add further thyme and bay (and anything other herbs you fancy, for that matter).

At this point, I popped in a handful of dried mushrooms too. Then everything was brought back to a simmer, the pot was covered with foil and lidded, and placed into an oven that had been preheated to 120˚C, where it sat happily for around seven hours.

In essence, this is a daube. Strictly speaking, that means a particular type of cooking pot, but it’s come to mean a slow-cooked dish, of a style that’s particularly linked with the south west of France.

Previous experience had suggested that two or even four hours was not long enough to ensure that the gravy/sauce was sweet and the meat so tender that you could cut it with a spoon.

The majority of the recipe is from Elisabeth Luard, who suggests, in European Peasant Cookery, “four hours at least”.

I deviated from her recipe by adding the vegetables and herbs to the overnight marinade – and by adding the dried mushrooms later.

One of the joys of now having pretty much (as far as I know) every English-language book about cookery from the area is that you start being able to learn little details.

The dried mushrooms are popular in Foix in the mountains – we spent a couple of nights there last year. They also use white wine instead of red there, according to Paula Wolfert in The Cooking of South West France, but I decided to just take the mushroom aspect of that regional derivation.

We’d spent much of Sunday gardening and had trimmed a lot of herbs right back to encourage bushier growth. So when I put on some rice to serve with the daube, The Other Half suggested adding some of the mint he’d trimmed. To that I therefore added a finely-chopped orange chilli from the garden.

On Monday, it was simply a question of reheating gently for an hour and then serving with heaps of buttery puréed potato.

For yesterday, there was little meat left, but a very meaty and flavoursome gravy/sauce.

I chucked in a tin of chopped tomatoes, some halved, peeled spuds and some halved chestnut mushrooms, and gave it around an hour. And it did delightfully.

All of which also means four days of pretty easy cooking – and perfectly good eating. And what more can you ask for?

What's your beef?

Regular readers of this blog will know that, among my pet gripes is the absence of modern recipes for slow-cooked food that actually involve, err, slow cooking.

In other words, not 90 minutes or two hours, but hours!

I can only assume that writers and publishers have convinced themselves that the modern domestic cook will not countenance cooking something for any longer longer.

But the problem with this thinking is that it doesn’t work.

I’ve eaten traditional beef dishes in France that have been melt-in-the-mouth gorgeous, coated in voluptuously sweet, thick sauce that, however humble the dish, leave you in sated awe.

In particular, I’m think of you, boeuf à la gardiane, in Nîmes in the summer of 2010.

And then I’ve tried to reproduce such dishes back at home. And I’ve also tried to cook dishes that use beer instead of wine.

And for all that I follow the instructions – from a variety of supposedly reliable sources – they invariably fail or at least fall short.

Take this recipe for a carbonnade flamande, a classic Flemish, northern French dish.

Cook for two hours.

And this is without mentioning all the different books I’ve cooked such dishes from – often books that have a history of providing me with excellent dishes. Except when it comes to anything that requires slow cooking.

The reason that they fall short is that they always seem a tad bitter when I cook them.

Well, the penny has finally dropped. That’s one of the differences that serious slow cooking makes – it sweetens everything.

This was finally grasped when I spotted the recipe for a stacotto in Elizabeth David’s Italian Food.

This hearty beef stew is almost ridiculously simple. But the divine Mrs D’s instructions made it clear that we were talking in terms of five hours cooking in a “very slow oven”.

My only problem was knowing exactly what that means in terms of the dial on my own cooker. Remember my other perennial gripe about lost skills and knowledge? Well it's always applied to me too – I'm having to learn from scratch.

I opted for about 80˚C, on the basis that that is what works for the River Café-style three-and-a-half-hour chicken that I love.

As it happens, it didn’t quite work that way and, on three hours, I turned the heat up a little; and then some more as it became clear, on five hours, that it was not ready.

When we ate it, it still wasn’t cooked quite enough for what is supposed to mean ‘over cooked’. But it was tasty and far, far closer to the real slow-cooked deal than I’ve managed before (apart from the recent cassoulet).

Mrs D started with around a kilo of lean meat (in imperial terms). I bought a piece of 1.5kg and made some adjustments on that basis. The meat was from Wild Dartmoor Beef and, as farmer Richard Vines always stresses, it's grass-finished – which really adds to the quality.

Peel and slice an onion, a couple of carrots and a couple of sticks of celery.

Melt some lard in a heavy pot. Gently brown the vegetables.

Add the meat – in one big piece – and brown on all sides. Add a couple of Italian sausages (or Toulouse ones, as I did), a glass of white wine, a generous dessertspoon of good tomato purée and some seasoning. I also added the blood that had been in the packet with the meat – why waste it? – and which I'd kept when I took the meat out and dried it off.

Cover with a disc of parchment paper and then your lid – and cook.

Now, since my little struggle, I have found this recipe for a daube by Paula Wolfert, who knows a thing or two about the cooking of south west France in particular and the Mediterranean in general.

She starts by heating the oven to 175˚C, cooking at that for an hour, then turning the heat down to 120˚C and cooking for a further three to four hours, “until the meat falls apart easily”.

I suspect that this is the way forward on the stracotto front too.

In the meantime, my not-quite-a-stracotto has meant very little cooking for the days since – and I’d hardly slaved in the kitchen on Sunday anyway.

On Monday, it was reheated, with a tin of tomatoes added as per some online recipes. These show clearly that, like any of these great, gutsy traditional dishes, there are as many ways to make it as there are people who have made it. And then a drained, rinsed tin of cannellini beans finished it off.

On Tuesday, it was served with par-boiled new potatoes that were finished in the pot.

And yesterday, the remains of the meat were cooked with chopped onion and crushed, boiled spuds in lard – a sort of cross between a hash and a bubble ‘n’ squeak.

It’s been a beefy week, alright! And real slow cooking is absolutely to be utilised even when, like me, you haven't got a slow cooker or the room for one.