Boeuf Bourguignon, Aged 14 years

On following recipes, and the limitations of authenticity and orthodoxy

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt in the palm (ideal for a functional tattoo, perhaps?)

This weekend I'm making Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon. It's probably the fifth or sixth time I've made it--the first time was in 2009, at the very outset of what would become my career in food. Inspired by my viewing of Julie & Julia (a film that I continue to appreciate on multiple levels, even though it hasn’t quite helped with the whole Julia canonization problem), I approached the associate marketing manager at Alfred A. Knopf (the publisher of Mastering the Art of French Cooking) to ask if I might help with some of the promotional efforts accompanying the release of the film. In particular, I wanted to make boeuf bourguignon, the dish that the film preserves in amber as worthy of on-screen preparation not once, twice, but four times. I made it myself, working in my barely-more-than-a-galley kitchen in NYC, and chronicled the entire experience for the Knopf marketing website. It was my first real foray into food writing, and really in many ways, into serious cooking. I was a dabbler in advanced cookery at the time, building most of my recipes on templates from friends, family, and the Barefoot Contessa’s sheet-pan and kosher-salt canon. But Julia’s recipe was the first one I felt I really had to treat as a foundational text, one that needed to be followed to the letter in order to honor her intent. It was a sublime dish, but more than anything, it felt like the first step in the intentional pursuit of my own culinary education. It seemed to me, upon skimming a piece of bread across the surface of the stew to skim its fat and pull up its luscious flavor, that the key ingredient wasn’t full-bodied red wine or blanched-and-crisped bacon; it was my whole-hearted submission to someone else’s expertise. It was an exercise in humility, and yielded much more than leftovers.

Looking back at that original blog post, I recognize that there’s so much I didn’t know about food at the time, both in technique and in telling my own story through it. I knew so little about the cookbook genre—both in the Pre-JC and post-JC era—or the intentional choices that Julia made to build a recipe that Americans could execute with easily accessible ingredients. Whether or not it was a “true” French bourguignon was almost beside the point, since in the 1960 American grocery stores, the ability to access shallots or tarragon or slab bacon was not a given, just as it is still not today for the vast majority of grocery stores outside of affluent urban-adjacent neighborhoods. But had Julia been writing the recipe for an audience in 2023, I don’t think she necessarily would have used a gourmet store to justify the choices she made. Indeed, her food politics (like mine) might have evolved enough to prioritize buying ingredients at a smaller, local grocery store instead of further lining the pockets of billionaires who don’t support their employees. She might have written some more flexibility into her recipes, acknowledging that, by the very nature of taking the recipes out of France, they could never be an exact replica of what French people would eat. Nor should they be—for while Julia offered us a primer on what French cooking was, she did not offer her translation of Le Guide Culinaire. Instead, she offered her best attempt that would give readers the best possible success in their home kitchens. True, Julia had little tolerance for the “flimsies,” the people who didn’t take the act of cooking seriously. But she almost didn’t hold to her own orthodoxy, or her own ego and expertise above all others. She was a lifelong learner, and by extension, a teacher. And she was a good one, because she built in the possibility of imperfection, offering readers a surprising amount of grace.

14 years later, the preparation of the dish has taken a different epistemological value for me. Now I don’t feel compelled to get out a ruler and ensure that my bacon lardons are perfectly 1.5 inches long; I know that’s about the length of my thumb from nail to knuckle. Instead of drying each cube of beef by hand in paper towels, I line a baking sheet with towels and spread the entire batch out to dry off. I measure out the half teaspoon of salt for seasoning in the palm of my hand, memorizing its weight and spread the way Judith Jones had done while learning to edit cookbooks, and while teaching me to edit my own. I don’t bother stripping the thyme leaves from the stem, since I know that they’ll get tossed later in the process. And most of all, I know to make it ahead of time, so the stew can be strained, cooked down, and skimmed for fat before I’m rushing it out to the dinner table. I am learning to leave room for my own modicum of grace. My suspicion is that Julia wouldn’t mind too much.

First attempt at boeuf bourguignon in my Harlem kitchen, August 2009. Oh you sweet summer child…

Recommendation: Not food-focused, but really worth savoring: we went to a superb concert at City Winery Boston on Wednesday to hear Eleri Ward perform. (Great venue, fabulous wine selection, really enjoyed the Monstah Blend.) I’d never been much of a concertgoer, but I feel like this artist—a superb singer-songwriter who does spectacularly rich acoustic interpretations of Stephen Sondheim songs—was made in a laboratory just for me. Give it a listen, she’s really quite lovely and off to a tremendous career. (Now if only I could get her to go to Marie’s Crisis with me…)

The Perfect Bite: If given the choice at a local bagel shop, I will always, always choose a bialy over a bagel. Even if it means half the caramelized onions and (sometimes) poppy seeds will tumble out in the toaster, I’m genuinely happy to scrape it back into place to savor it in its messy, slightly overtoasted perfection (and best when topped with a few strategic slivers of smoked salmon and a good schmear.) Post coming someday about my agnostic relationship to Jewish food, but my devotion to bialys is beyond reproach.

Cooked & Consumed: Had a ton of leftover challah in our house this week, so threw it into a classic bread pudding via Mark Bittman. I fudged it a bit, warming up the beaten eggs with the rest of the ingredients by mistake, but the results still turned out splendidly, with a nice bit of crunchy bread atop the creamy interior. (And, with a spoonful of mini chocolate chips tossed into one batch, it is astonishingly close in flavor to a chocolate chip cookie. No notes.)