Don't Sweat the Aubergine

I differ with a more prestigious judge, Raymond Blanc.
    You could leave out the wine, or use a different alcohol: brandy or calvados, bubbled until they lose their harsh, spirity edge ( see here ); beer or cider.
    Add some lardons or chopped-up bits of streaky bacon. Fry them, very gently, first; the vegetables will have some bacon fat to fry in.
    To the sauce, add tomatoes: either fresh ones, skinned ( see here ) and chopped (almost all recipes tell you to deseed them, but I never bother), or tinned. In carbonnade of beef, the meat is cooked either entirely in beer, or in a mixture of beer and stock; stout works well. Tomato ketchup is a good complement to a rich, fatty cut of beef such as oxtail.
    Try Worcester or soy sauce; remember that both are salty. Lamb goes well with lemon and orange – include peelings of zest; and it goes well, too, with spices such as cumin and coriander, which you fry with the vegetables.
    Ingredients added towards the end of cooking, as the mushrooms are here, are known as the garnish . Other nice garnishes include baby onions (softened gently in butter), lardons of bacon or pancetta (also fried), and croutons – the easiest way to make these is to toss cubes of bread in olive oil, spread them out on a baking tray, and put them in the oven until golden.
    A less la-di-da kind of garnish is the dumpling . Usually dumplings contain just over two parts self-raising flour to one part suet: Fergus Henderson’s recipe (
Nose to Tail Eating
), which makes plenty of dumplings for 6, gives 100g suet, 225g self-raising flour, salt and a beaten egg: you mix them together, adding a little water to bring the mixture to the consistency of a sticky dough, shape them into walnut-sized balls, and cook for about 10 minutes. You could poach or steam them, in a covered pan containing water; or you could ladle into the pan some of the liquid from the stew, put in the dumplings, cover, and simmer.
    That kind of dumpling seems to be the right match for a beef stew. Dried beans or chickpeas suit lamb particularly well. Cook them apart ( see here and here ), and add them at the same time as you would any other garnish.
    Some fresh herbs could go into the stew just before serving: parsley, say, or tarragon, or oregano.
    If you don’t want a garnish, but have skimmed the sauce, consider adding a knob of butter, away from the heat, just before serving. It will enrich the dish.
    Boeuf Bourguignon belongs to the family of stews in which the meat has an initial bath in a marinade. There are many strict and elaborate recipes, so let us take comfort – as we have to do so often – in Elizabeth David’s observation that ‘Such dishes do not, of course, have a rigid formula.’ You might put your beef into a marinade consisting of a bottle of red wine, a chopped onion, a tablespoon of olive oil, some herbs, and salt. (The wine might be a Burgundy or a Côtes du Rhone. I’m sure you don’t want to use an expensive one ; but don’t use one you would find undrinkable.) Leave it overnight. The next day, remove the meat and pat it dry. Follow the basic recipe as above, using the marinade, sieved, as the cooking liquid, and topping it up with stock if necessary. Try to include bacon in the initial preparation; baby onions are the best garnish.
----
WHY YOU DO IT
----
    1 • What meat? The meats for stewing are the ‘tough’ cuts: among them chuck or stewing steak, oxtail, shin of beef; or shanks, shoulder, middle neck and scrag end of lamb. They come from the bits of the animal that get the most exercise, and that have muscles with a strong reinforcment of connective tissue. This tissue, consisting largely of a protein called collagen, is very difficult to chew; but, subjected to slow cooking, the collagen breaks down into succulent gelatine.
    The proteins in muscle fibres toughen up, expelling all their moisture, if cooked for too long. That’s why we fry or grill lean cuts such as fillet steak as quickly as possible. If we stewed them for any length of time they would become – in spite of their liquid surroundings – unbearably dry. In tough cuts, the fibres dry out too, of course; but they become looser, and their gelatinous lubrication gives them a tender feel in the mouth.
    2 • Browning meat and the ‘sealing’ theory . You are searing the meat, but most definitely not, in spite of the surprisingly resilient popularity of the term, ‘sealing’ it. The notion of frying meat in order to ‘seal in’