15 June 2007
Irish Stew
I’m not sure how the Irish Stew came to be labelled with “Irish”. At home, it was just stew, and it rather confused me later on to find references to it by nationality, as though stews elsewhere were different. Stew is also a winter sort of a dish, or at least autumn, but it’s a chilly, foggy day in June here, and so it’s springing to mind. Winter dishes, from my point of view, are the ones that leave you feeling warm. They have to be filling, solid, served hot, and with both meat and carbohydrates included. They should be savoury, and they should have a good variety of ingredients going in. Stew fits this pretty much ideally.
I’ve eaten a wide variety of stews in Ireland, and really, the only thing that all of them have in common is that they contain red meat, potatoes and carrots in a kind of soup. What I’m going to write about here, though, is the stew my father taught me to make, which I’d hold up as one of the best I’ve eaten.
The first step is the meat. You need lamb, or beef (or possibly mutton or venison, though I haven’t tried either). For lamb, it’s usually a case of taking what the butcher has, since you don’t often get to decide on cuts. For beef, I’ve found that round steak is best - what’s sold as “stewing beef” is usually meat that didn’t make any other grade. You want it in cubes, of about an inch to a side. Much smaller, and it’ll vanish, and larger chunks mean you end up dealing with a different texture when everything is cooked. Tou should trim off big chunks of fat, while small bits and marbling can be left where they are.
Next, the flour. This step is important, because it contributes a great deal to the eventual thickness of the soup. Leave it out, and you end up with thin, clear broth, which is not a part of the Real Stew Experience. So get your flour - I haven’t tried wholemeal, but everything else has worked perfectly well - and put it in a decent-sized dish, tupperware container, or the like. Add some salt and more pepper than quite seems reasonable. The pepper is going to be in the stew from the very start, and two or three hours cooking does a lot to make it milder. Mix that lot up, and roll the meat in the mixture so that it’s floured on all sides. I find it easier, from a purely practical point of view, to do this in small batches, rather than dumping the whole lot in, but I don’t always remember that in the heat of the moment.
Now, browning the floured meat. For this, you need a frying pan, or possibly a wok. The idea here is to brown the outside of the meat, not to cook it through. This gives each piece of meat some coherence, and prevents them disintegrating over the cooking period, as well as getting a head start on the taste. It also allows the flour to start becoming a thickening agent. At home in Wexford, we always used plain vegetable oil for the frying, but I’ve used olive oil to good effect, and butter as well. Get it up to a good heat, though not smoking hot, and quickly brown the surface of the floured meat. Again, small batches are good, and allow the pan to stay fairly hot. As you finish each batch, put it all into the bottom of a big saucepan.
When all the meat is done, put water into the saucepan on top of it. You’re looking for a fair bit of water here, three or four times as much as is necessary to cover the the meat, and maybe some more if you have a lot of vegetables to go in. You could use stock instead of water at this point, if you’re inclined, but I never have. I’ve tried adding both beer and wine, and both go pretty well - Guinness in particular. Set it to heat up to a simmer, and go work on the vegetables.
First, potatoes. Ideally, you want good, big, and probably old potatoes - if you’ve new ones, they’ll do, but I prefer to eat them on their own; they’re too good for stewing. Peel them, and chop them into one-inch cubes. Smaller is fine, if you have the patience. Set them aside, and go on to the carrots - peel, and slice into rounds about a quarter-inch thick (about half a centimetre, and no need to be more precise than that). After those two, you should now prep any other hard vegetables you’re using. For me, this is when the the turnip goes in, and I have one huge cleaver of a knife that sees very little use other than on stew turnips and the occasional squash. You could also add parsnips, and it’s entirely possible that sweet potato, squash, celeriac, and other more exotic goods like that would work well - let me know, should you try them.
By this time, there should be a rather horrifying collection of what can only be called scum on the surface of the simmering water. Scoop it off, and dispose of it, and once the surface is clear, dump in your vegetables. Bring the stew back to a slow simmer, and prepare to leave it there for about an hour. Do not let it boil! You want the various components to slowly dissolve, not shatter into pulp. Keeping it below a simmer is preferable to above, so err on the side of caution. A lid is a good idea here, so that it doesn’t evaporate too much.
After an hour, you can add onions (chopped into large chunks) and celery (half-inch rounds). Other soft vegetables or even fruit can go in now - I like to add a few chunks of apple, especially in autumn stews. Add herbs to taste at this stage as well - I go for the mix sold in Ireland as “mixed herbs”, which is basil, thyme, oregano, parsley and sage. For the very depths of winter, you could consider some chilli powder as well, although I find the stew warming enough on its own.
Leave that to cook for another hour, taking the lid off for the last twenty minutes to half an hour so it can thicken down a bit. Serve in bowls, with buttered bread - brown bread is nearly always the choice in pubs, but I think fresh baguettes or the like go better, with real butter. Many kinds of beer go well here - or red wine. If you’ve apples in the stew, echo that with cider.