When I was in my twenties and living in New York City, I decided to impress my new boyfriend by serving Julia Child’s classic dish boeuf bourguignon in my apartment, which sat on the third floor of a dingy tenement walkup with a tiny and outdated kitchen. Some relevant facts: I was not a very experienced cook; my kitchen had very little counter space; the recipe has many, many ingredients and involves several steps; and the dinner date was in the middle of the week. Wisely, I thought, I’d simply prepare the entire dish the night before after getting home from work and then just reheat it the next evening.
For the uninitiated, Julia’s recipe includes bacon sliced into big slivers (“lardons”), three pounds of beef cubes that are browned in the same pot you’ve just sautéed the lardons, sliced and peeled carrots and yellow onions, a bottle of red wine, a cup of cognac, beef stock, tomato paste, smashed garlic, various herbs, a pile of teeny weeny pearl onions brown-braised in stock (that have to be painstakingly peeled and scored first) and a truckload of quartered fresh mushrooms sautéed in butter in a separate pan.
I got off work at five-thirty, so I guess I started frying the lardons around seven. Probably around eight, I was blotting the mountainous pile of beef chunks with paper towels (Julia cautioned that otherwise they wouldn’t brown), after which I fried them on all sides. This took a long time, longer than I could have possibly imagined. Most of us see beef stew packages at the grocery store that are about a pound. Three pounds is a hill about a foot high.
While that was happening, I was slicing the yellow onions and carrots, which I then added to the beef. At that point, I had to add the bottle of red wine along with the tomato paste and other ingredients. However, I didn’t drink and didn’t own a corkscrew, so I had to stab repeatedly at the cork for several minutes with a sharp knife until it was pushed down into the wine, where it broke into hundreds of unimaginably microscopic pieces.
I poured the wine into a large bowl through a spaghetti colander since I didn’t own a strainer. Around half the cork pieces slid through the holes, so I had to fish those out with a spoon for several precious minutes. Finally, I added the wine along with the stock and herbs to the browned beef and lardons. Then, I carefully slid the casserole dish into the oven for the prescribed three hours while I got the onions and mushrooms ready in separate pots on top of my tiny, tiny apartment stove.
At this point, it was around ten p.m., and I had a vicious but brief internal struggle over whether I should go to bed and set the alarm for one a.m. or just grit my teeth and power through. I decided on the latter. Three hours later, I unscrewed the bottle of cognac and poured some of it over the stew and set fire to it, the final step in this recipe. I fell into bed trembling with exhaustion, my hair reeking of sautéed lardon. The entire apartment stunk of cooked beef. I recall looking at the little clock by my bed and realizing I had to get up very soon and go to work, and then I couldn’t sleep just thinking about that.
The next evening, my date sat at my tiny kitchen table and picked out all the mushrooms, carrots and onions (“I’m just a meat and potatoes guy from the Midwest”). He peered at the egg noodles poking out from underneath his little heap of stew and asked what they were, and then decided not to eat those, either.
For some reason, I decided to give our faltering relationship another chance. That weekend, he took me to an Off-Off Broadway show featuring Japanese Noh performers, which I found excruciating. I remember I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the performance and when I inquired about that, I was told I’d have to walk across the stage to get to the ladies room. I think it’s fair to say that this was the last straw, and the relationship ended on that note. But the good news is that the mountain of leftover boeuf bourguignon was served to a couple of very appreciative friends who ate every last bit of it, carrots, mushrooms, onions, noodles and all.
