A Boeuf Bourguignon in (Gasp!) Five Steps
By Julia Moskin
Published: New York Times, August 25, 2009

WITH the success of “Julie & Julia” in movie theaters, and Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” storming best-seller lists, boeuf bourguignon — the film’s slow-braised culinary centerpiece — has probably never been made by so many American home cooks, at least not in August.

Ms. Child’s boeuf bourguignon is constantly cited for its authenticity. Her recipe is, completely and perfectly, French. (That said, her use of tomato is not strictly traditional.)
But although we’re suddenly a nation of pearl-onion-peelers, Ms. Child’s recipe is not the boeuf bourguignon that most French cooks would make.

“Mastering the Art of French Cooking” is actually a translation of French restaurant technique to American home kitchens. Ms. Child learned at a professional culinary school, not from home cooks. Her stew’s painstaking multistep method — cooking all the vegetables separately, straining the sauce, etc. — has chefly fingerprints all over it.

For home cooks craving this deep, savory stew, there’s a more direct translation in Ginette Mathiot’s “Je Sais Cuisiner” (“I Know How to Cook”), an authoritative cookbook for French housewives first published in 1932, and often described as the French “Joy of Cooking.”
Ms. Mathiot, who died in 1998, studied and taught at the Sorbonne when enseignement ménager, or home economics, still had the status of an academic discipline.
The book, with more than 1,400 recipes, has sold more than six million copies. The first English version will be published in October by Phaidon Press, translated by Clotilde Dusoulier, the Parisian food writer who blogs at chocolateandzucchini.com.

“You could make Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon once in your life and learn a lot,” she said. “But sometimes having that much detail can be intimidating.” Ms. Mathiot’s recipe, she said, better reflects “daily reality.”
Ms. Mathiot’s boeuf bourguignon has just nine ingredients (plus salt and pepper) and takes just five steps. The meat is browned in the same fat as some chopped onions and bacon pieces. Flour is sprinkled in and browned — this is the key to a thick, but not too winy, sauce — then slowly cooked in liquid, with mushrooms tossed in toward the end. The hands-on time for the cook: about 25 minutes, compared with at least 90 minutes for Ms. Child’s recipe.

Ms. Mathiot’s version, especially when left for a day to assimilate its flavors, is equally suave and feels more satisfying — great payoff for little work.
“Most home cooks in France would not make such an elaborate version of what is supposed to be a simple stew,” Ms. Dusoulier said.