No one sneers at vegetarian cooking like the practitioners of classic French cuisine. Their recipes are so sacred, their art so carefully considered, that any substitution is viewed as an insult to the French people as a whole. Kelp powder in your veggie bouillabaisse? C’est scandaleux! So when I was assigned boeuf bourguignon to vegetize, I turned to an old friend to help me get a handle on the spirit of this continental conundrum: Julia Child’s 1961 classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It’s here that Julia described this stew as “Certainly one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man.”
On the surface, boeuf bourguignon is a simple red-wine-and-beef stew, a peasant dish whose root vegetables and undistinguished cuts of meat reveal a surprising depth of flavor. In recent years, this classic has been revived, joining the ranks of haute cuisine and being relegated to that class of dishes set aside for special occasions – the season of which we are trekking through full steam. So let’s get to the dirty work, shall we?
To read more about how Beth Styles vegetized this classic beef dish, click here. To get cooking right now, click here for the recipe.
-photo by Kristi Schiffman
This article appears in February 2014.